1 Psychology 307: Cultural Psychology Lecture 1

2 Basic Concepts 1.What is culture? 2.What is cultural psychology?

3 1. describe the categories of definitions of culture that have been identified in the literature. By the end of today’s class, you should be able to: 3. distinguish between the universalist view of the mind and relativist view of the mind. 4. describe Berry’s ecocultural model of the mind. 2. explain why “race” is not a valid construct.

4 What is culture? ● A multitude of definitions of culture have been proposed by theorists. As early as 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn identified more than 160 definitions of culture in the anthropological literature. They classified these definitions into broad 6 categories:

5 (a) Descriptive definitions E.g., Culture refers to “all social activities in the broadest sense, such as language, marriage, property system, etiquette, industries, art, etc.” (Wissler, 1920).

6 (b) Historical definitions E.g., “As a general term, culture means the total social heredity of mankind, while as a specific term a culture means a particular strain of social heredity” (Linton, 1936).

7 (c) Normative definitions E.g., “Patterns for living... the individual's role in the unending kaleidoscope of life situations of every kind and the rules and models for attitude and conduct in them” (Brooks, 1968).

8 (d) Psychological definitions E.g., “Culture consists of traditional ways of solving problems …. of responses which have been accepted because they have met with success; in brief, culture consists of learned problem-solutions” (Ford, 1942).

9 (e) Structural definitions E.g., “A culture consists of inventions or … [cultural] traits, integrated into a system, with varying degrees of correlation between the parts …. [The] traits … give us our social institutions …. The institutions of a culture are interlinked to form a pattern which is unique for each society” (Ogburn & Nimkoff, 1940).

10 (f) Non-genetic definitions E.g., “Culture consists of all phenomena that have been directly or indirectly caused by … nongenetic communication of phenomena from one individual to another” (Hart, 1941).

11 ● The primary definition offered in the textbook was taken from Richerson and Boyd (2005). They define culture as: “ “information capable of affecting individuals’ behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.” ● This definition would be categorized as a definition according to Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) classification system. ___________

12 ● Following from this definition, any group that shares information through social transmission that is capable of affecting behaviour may be described as a cultural group. ● Cultural psychologists tend to define cultural groups on the basis of nationality.

13 What is cultural psychology? ● Cultural psychology is concerned with identifying the links between culture and the psychological processes of people exposed to that culture. ● “General” psychology adopts a universalist view of the mind. In contrast, cultural psychology adopts a relativist view the mind.

14 ● Consistent with the relativist view of the mind, Shweder (1991) described cultural psychology as “the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion.” ● Berry (1986; Berry et al., 2002) developed the following ecocultural model to illustrate the links between culture and the psychological processes of people exposed to that culture:

15 ECOLOGICAL CONTEXT BIOLOGICAL ADAPTATION and CULTURAL ADAPTATION SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT ECOLOGICAL INFLUENCES OBSERVABLE BEHAVIOURS INFERRED CHARACTERISTICS PROCESS VARIABLES PSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLES BACKGROUND VARIABLES INDIVIDUAL LEVELPOPULATION LEVEL GENETIC TRANSMISSION CULTURAL TRANSMISSION ACCULTURATION

16 Basic Concepts 1.What is culture? 2.What is cultural psychology?