Lecture 2: Studying Cultural Psychology

Through the last few millenia, humans have adapted to a society that is highly dependent upon cultural learning and accumulation. We share values and cultural ideologies that set individuals apart from others all over the world. Cultural ideas are a necessity for our success and survival.

Shweder: "I embrace all cultures. Blackhaws and Canucks."

Richard Shweder, now a professor at the University of Chicago, is known as one of the founders of cultural Psychology. He contrasted "general psychology" with "cultural psychology" and came up with this view of general psychology:

"A key goal of general psychology is to reveal the underlying, and universal, CPU. To do this, we need to isolate it from context and content, to reduce the noise and allow us to detect a clear signal. Avoid studying multiple cultures as this increases the amount of noise. Any cultural variation that is found occurs because of noise that conceals the CPU. "Real" cultural variation can't exist, because the "real" mind is the CPU, which is universal."

I'm not sure if this is a widely accepted view of general psychology, but this view seems to be highly limited to the lab. Extrapolating data taken by completely stripping the context and content from the real world doesn't seem like a very good idea. Real life is so complex and our actions cannot be predicted without the context of the situation in my opinion. Also, this view of general psychology is heavily weighted towards the nature side of the "nature vs nurture" debate. If the mind is universal, then the view of "nurture" is the noise? The human mind is shaped from birth to death by our experiences and I believe that the state of our mind at any given point in time will differ greatly. Continuing on...

"In contrast, cultural psychology maintains that the mind cannot be separated from content or context. Mind and culture are mutually constituted. That is, mind arises from participating in a culture, with all activities, challenges, practices, and scripts inherent with it. Also, culture arises from the participation of the minds within it."

This is more in line with how I think psychologists should study people. To remove so much context and content, the results show what would happen in the "universal" CPU of the mind, but these results are not very applicable to real life. It also seems like Shweder presented an exaggerated view of general psychology, or an outdated one; that's definitely not the type of stuff I learned in Psy 100.

Next in class, we did a visual test comparing lines in boxes. We had to determine from two choices which line corresponded to a blown up image of one of the two choices. Three questions testing relative sizes (to the box) and three questions testing absolute sizes. Then we were surveyed by our ethnicity and whether we got more absolute or relative questions correct (or got the same). This was to demonstrate in class a study done by Hedden et al. in 2008 where they found that East Asians showed more brain activation in the left inferior parietal lobule and the right precentral gyrus for the absolute tasks, while their American counterparts showed more for the relative tasks. These regions have to do with attentional control; when the subjects did the culturally unfamiliar task, these brain regions were activated more. Conclusion: Culture differentiates us in many ways, including ways in which we do tasks such as trying to find similarities in lines within boxes. (lol)

Finally, Dr. Heine addressed the serious fact that some researchers don't concern themselves with the trend of the subjects in their studies. In the top psychology journals, 68% of the participants were American, and 96% were from industrialized Western countries, while 70% were psychology undergraduates. This means that the odds of a randomly chosen American undergraduate vs a non undergraduate is over 4000 to 1!

So what do you guys think about the applicability of studies cited in the news or magazines to the general public? Even if they are properly managed studies that follow good scientific practices, the nature of the subjects alone makes it so that not everyone can relate to a finding, yet most people do. Feel free to leave comments!