Chapter 5: Culture and Cognition

Psychologists use the term cognition to denote all the mental processes we use to transform sensory input into knowledge

Some of the first cognitive processes to consider are attention, sensation and perception o Attention refers to the focusing of our limited capacities of consciousness on a particular set of stimuli,

more of whose features are noted and processed in more depth than is true of non-focal stimuli o Sensation refers to the feelings that result from excitation of the sensory receptors (touch, taste, smell,

sight, hearing) o Perception refers to our initial interpretations of the sensations

Afterward, individuals engage in higher-order mental processes including thinking and reasoning, language, memory, problem solving, decision-making,

There are interesting cultural differences in perception and attention, categorization, some memory tasks, math abilities, problem solving, the factors that enhance creativity, and dialectical thinking

What is the source of these observed differences between countries?

CULTURE AS COGNITION

Many psychologists view culture itself as cognition; in psychology, culture is generally viewed as a set of mental representations about the world

Hofstede: culture = “mental programming” o Likened culture to computer software; just as different software exists to do different things even with

the same computer equipment, different cultural “programs” exist that enable individuals to engage in different behaviors, even given the same hardware

Norms, opinions, beliefs, values, and worldviews are all cognitive products and as such, one can view the contents of culture as being essentially cognitive

We defined human culture as a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, pursue happiness and well-being, and derive meaning from life

o This definition of culture also essentially views culture as a knowledge system—one from which individuals create and derive knowledge about how to live

Cultures themselves are cognitive

They are knowledge representations that include specific meanings and information, translated into norms, opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs

These in turn are manifested in overt behaviors and the physical elements of culture

This way of thinking underlies research that involves a technique known as priming, which is a method used to determine if one stimulus affects another

CULTURE, ATTENTION, SENSATION, AND PERCEPTION Preception and Physical Reality

Regardless of culture, our perceptions of the world do not necessarily match the physical realities of the world o For instance, all humans have a blind spot in each eye—a spot with no sensory receptors, where the

optic nerve goes through the layer of receptor cells on its way back toward the brain o But we don’t experience a hole in the world o With the help of micro eye movements called microsaccades, our brains fill it in so it looks as if we see

everything

Do our experiences and beliefs about the world influence what we perceive? Do other people perceive things the same as we do? How does culture influence this process?

Influences on Visual Perception Optical Illusions

Optical Illusions are perceptions that involve an apparent discrepancy between how an object looks and what it actually is

Mueller-Lyer illusion:

o Subjects viewing these two figures typically judge the line with the arrowheads pointing in as longer than the other line—even though the lines are actually the same length

Horizontal-vertical illusion: o When subjects are asked to judge which line is longer, they typically respond that the vertical line is

longer—when, again, they are the same length

Ponzo illusion: o When subjects view this image, they typically report that the horizontal line closer to the origin of the

diagonals is longer than the one away from the origin o They are the same length

Carpentered world theory: which suggests that people (at least most Americans) are used to seeing things that are rectangular in shape and unconsciously come to expect things to have squared corners

o In the Mueller-Lyer illusion, we tend to see the figures as having square corners that project toward or away from us

o We know that things that look the same size to our eyes but are at different distances are actually different in size

Front-horizontal foreshortening theory: suggests that we interpret vertical lines as horizontal lines extending into the distance

o In the horizontal-vertical illusion, we interpret the vertical line as extending away from us, and we know that a line of set length that is farther away from us must be longer

Both theories assume that the way we see the world is developed over time through our experiences

Although learning helps us see well most of the time, it is what causes us to misjudge optical illusions

English people in Rivers’ study were used to seeing rectangular shapes, people in India and New Guinea were more accustomed to rounded and irregular environments

o In the Mueller-Lyer illusion, therefore, English people would tend to see the figures as squared corners projecting toward or away from them, but Indians and New Guineans would have less tendency to make the same perceptual mistake

Symbolizing three dimensions in two theory: suggests that people in Western cultures focus more on representations on paper than do people in other cultures—and in particular, spend more time learning to interpret pictures

o Thus, people in New Guinea and India are less likely to be fooled by the Mueller-Lyer illusion because it is more “foreign” to them

o They are more fooled by the horizontal-vertical illusion, however, because it is more representative of their lifestyle

The effects of the illusions declined and nearly disappeared with older subjects – but based on the theories, we might expect the effects of the illusions to increase with age because older people have had more time to learn about their environments than younger people

o Pollack and Silvar (1967): showed that the effects of the Mueller-Lyer illusion are related to the ability to detect contours, and this ability declines with age

Hudson, 1960: highlighted cultural differences in perception

o He had an artist draw pictures that psychologists thought would evoke deep emotions in Bantu tribe members

o Bantu often saw the pictures in a very different way than anticipated; in particular, they often did not use relative size as a cue to depth

o Most Americans would see the hunter preparing to throw his spear at the gazelle in the foreground, while an elephant stands on a hill in the background

o Many of the Bantu, however, thought the hunter in a similar picture was preparing to stab the baby elephant

o Found that these differences in depth perception were related to both education and exposure to European cultures

o Bantu people who had been educated in European schools, or who had more experience with European culture, saw things as Europeans did

o Bantu people who had no education and little exposure to Western culture saw the pictures differently

No differences between the Himba and the Americans, and the authors argued that humans might have a genetic predisposition for perceiving irregular, artifactual shapes, independent of culture

Masuda and Nisbett (2001): asked American and Japanese university students to view an animated version of the scene twice for 20 seconds each

o Immediately after viewing asked to recall as many objects in the scene as possible o Researchers then categorized the responses of the respondents into whether the object recalled was a

focal, main object of the picture, or a background object o Found that there were no differences in recalling the focal, main object of the scene between the

Americans and Japanese; the Japanese did, however, remember more of the background objects

In a second task, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) then showed respondents stimuli and asked them if they had seen them before in the original fish scene

o New stimuli: some were objects that indeed were in the original and some were not o Also varied the background, so that some stimuli included the old background, some the new, and some

no background at all o They found that the Japanese were much more influenced by the changes in the background; when the

Japanese saw new or no backgrounds, their rates of recognition were significantly worse than when they saw the original backgrounds

o Background did not affect the Americans

Both Americans and Japanese detected a larger number of contextual changes in the scenes after they saw pictures from a Japanese environment, suggesting that the environment affords the cultural differences in perception and attention

This line of research has led to the interesting insight that people of different cultures differ on whether they facilitate holistic vs. analytic perception

o People in Western cultures tend to engage in context-independent and analytic perceptual processes by focusing on a salient object (or person) independently from the context in which it is embedded

o People in East Asian cultures tend to engage in context-dependent and holistic perceptual processes by attending to the relationship between the object and the context in which the object is located

CULTURE AND THINKING Culture and Categorization

People categorize on the basis of similarities and attach labels (words) to groups of objects perceived to have something in common

The process of categorization is universal to all humans

Verbal language is based on categorization and concept formation; words are merely symbols for objects in our physical environment

Some categories appear to be universal across cultures: o Facial expressions that signal basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust—

are placed in the same categories across cultures

o Way people select and remember colors appears to be largely independent of both culture and language

These cross-cultural parallels suggest that physiological factors influence the way humans categorize certain basic stimuli

Ji, Zhang, and Nisbett (2004): conducted similar tests with Americans and bilingual Chinese (mainland and Taiwan) participants, having them group sets of three words in either English or Chinese, and found similar results, suggesting that the cultural differences in categorization styles were not affected by language

Culture and Memory

Individuals from nonliterate societies develop better memory skills because they do not have the ability to write things down to remember them

Ross and Millson (1970): suspected that reliance on an oral tradition might make people better at remembering o They compared the ability of American and Ghanaian college students to remember stories that were

read aloud o Findings suggest that cultural differences in memory as a function of oral tradition may be limited to

meaningful material

Serial position effect: an aspect of memory o This effect suggests that we remember things better if they are either the first (primacy effect) or last

(recency effect) item in a list of things to remember o Cole and Scribner (1974): found no relation between serial position and the likelihood of being

remembered in studying the memory of Kpelle tribespeople in Liberia o Wagner (1980): compared groups of Moroccan children who had and had not gone to school and found

that the primacy effect was much stronger in the children who had been to school Participants who have been to school, therefore, have had more practice in memorizing than

have unschooled individuals They are also able to apply these skills in test situations that resemble their school experience

Constants about memory across cultures: memory abilities tend to decrease as people get older

Hindsight bias: the process in which individuals adjust their memory for something after they find out the true outcome

o Ex. when someone is asked to guess the number of beads in a jar, they may say 350. When they find out later that the actual number is 647, people will often remember their original estimate to be 450, or some number closer to the true outcome

o Choi and Nisbett (2000): Koreans exhibited more hindsight bias than Americans o Heine and Lehman (1996): reported no differences between Japanese and Canadians o Pohl, Bender, & Lachmann, (2002): found no cultural differences in hindsight bias in participants from

Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America also, providing evidence for its universality

Episodic memory: refers to the recollection of specific events that took place at a particular time and place in the past

o Across several studies, European and European-American adults and children often exhibit greater episodic memories in the recollection of autobiographic events than Asian and Asian-Americans

o Cultural differences were not accounted for by general cognitive or memory capacity differences between the groups, language artifacts or narrative style, different norms of expression, different life experiences, or influences of the test context

o The differences appear to occur because of differences in cultural differences in self-construals, emotion knowledge, and interpersonal processes

Culture and Math Abilities

like other symbolic languages, math unique to human cultures

Ability to do math is a universal human psychological process

Clearly there are national differences in overall math abilities and achievements

o Asian countries continued to have the highest percentages of students reaching the advanced International Benchmark, representing fluency on items involving the most complex topics and reasoning skills

Differences across countries clearly exist in math and science abilities – but, the source of these differences is not clear

Conceptions of numbers, such as the number line, are cultural inventions that probably occur because of a combination of cultural practices in everyday life and the educational system, the value placed on math and science at home and in schools, and even in the numbering systems used across cultures and languages

o These differences may contribute to differences in math abilities

Cross-cultural phenomenon concerns the gender gap in mathematics achievement o Gap exists in some cultures but not others o Else-Quest, Hyde, and Linn (2010): provided evidence for a gender stratification hypothesis that

suggests that gender differences are related to cultural variations in opportunity structures for girls and women

Found that gender equity in school enrollment, women’s share of research jobs, and women’s parliamentary representation were the most powerful predictors of cross-national variability in gender gaps in math

Studies of an area known as everyday cognition indicate that, even without formal educational systems, members of all cultures learn math skill

o An area of study that examines cognitive skills and abilities that are used in everyday functioning that appear to develop without formal education, but from performing daily tasks of living and working

Geometry, a topic we typically associate with middle- or high-school math classes, may in fact be a core intuition found in all humans

Findings from studies on everyday cognition provide fairly clear evidence that math abilities are universal to all humans

Culture and Problem Solving

Problem solving: process by which we attempt to discover ways of achieving goals that do not seem readily attainable

Experiments asking people from different cultures to solve unfamiliar problems in artificial settings o Cole et al. (1971): older American subjects combined the two steps with ease to solve a problem o However, Liberian subjects of all ages and educational backgrounds experienced great difficulty solving

the problem; less than a third of the adults were successful o This experiment, however, may have been biased in favor of the Americans o Cole and his colleagues repeated their experiment with materials familiar to people in Liberia o The great majority of Liberians solved the problem easily o The researchers designed a third experiment, combining elements from both the first and second tests o The third test produced results similar to the first experiment – while Americans solved the problem

with ease, most Liberians were not able to retrieve the key to open the box

When presented with problems using materials and concepts already familiar to them, Liberians drew logical conclusions effortlessly. When the test situation was alien to them, however, they had difficulty knowing where to begin

Various explanations have been proposed to account for the inability of uneducated people to complete word problems

It may be that illiterate people actually think differently from those who are educated

According to this hypothesis, logical reasoning is essentially artificial; it is a skill that must be learned in a Westernized school setting

Scribner (1979): questioned whether illiterate subjects are truly incapable of thinking logically o When uneducated peasants were asked to explain illogical answers to syllogism problems, they

consistently cited evidence that was known to them personally o Stated they did not know anything about the subject, ignoring the premises given to them o Individuals appear to be unable or unwilling to apply concepts of scientific thinking to verbal problems

o Not because they lack the capacity to reason logically; rather, they don’t understand the hypothetical nature of verbal problems or view them with the same degree of importance

Uneducated people have difficulty understanding the notion that questions need not be requests for information

Culture and Creativity

Research on creativity in the United States suggests that it depends on divergent thinking rather than on the convergent thinking that is typically assessed in measures of intelligence

Sternberg & Lubart, (1995, 1999): creative individuals have a high capacity for hard work, a willingness to take risks, and a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder

Same characteristics appear to be true of creative individuals in other cultures as well

Some important differences have been noted in the specific ways in which creativity can be fostered in different cultures

o Collectivistic countries preferred creative people to seek cross-functional support for their efforts

Csikszentmihalyi (1999): although creative individuals may share some common core characteristics across cultures, they need to adapt their abilities to the specific cultural milieu within which they function, particularly in the implementation and adoption of their creative ideas

Goncalo & Staw (2006): creativity requires people to “get outside of their own box” or framework; o Another area of cultural difference would be the degree to which this ability is fostered

These effects also exist on the group level: individualistic groups have been shown to be more creative than collectivistic groups

Maddux and Galinsky (2009): showed that time spent living abroad was positively related with creativity Culture and Dialectical Thinking

Dialectical thinking: the tendency to accept what seem to be contradictions in thought or beliefs

Positive logical determinism: a tendency to see contradictions as mutually exclusive categories, as either-or, yes-no, one-or-the-other types of categories

Peng and Nisbett (1999): cross-cultural research of the past decade has demonstrated that East Asians tend to prefer dialectical thinking, and Americans prefer logical deterministic thinking

Recent research comparing East Asians with U.S. Americans, have shown that dialectical thinkers show greater tolerance of contradiction

Expanded on the concept of dialectical thinking to create the construct of naïve dialectivism (Peng, Spencer-Rodgers, & Zhong, 2006),

Naïve dialectivism: a constellation of lay beliefs about the nature of the world (rather than a cognitive style as suggested by dialectical thinking); is characterized by the doctrine of the mean, or the belief that the truth is always somewhere in the middle

Culture, Regrets, and Counterfactual Thinking

Counterfactual thinking: hypothetical beliefs about the past that could have occurred in order to avoid or change a negative outcome; often related to regret

Classified into two types: actions and inactions o Inaction: “If I had only studied harder,” “If I had only been a better parent,” “If I had only trained harder” o Action: “If I hadn’t said what I said,” “If I didn’t eat that last piece of cake,” “If I weren’t driving so fast”

United States: regrets related to thoughts of inaction are more prevalent than regrets related to action

Same trend has been found in other cultures as well: study of Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Russians, all participants in all cultures experienced more regret over inaction than action

Thus, the emotion of regret, and the potential causes of it, appears to be universal

CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS Culture and Dreams

There are considerable cultural differences in the manifest content of dreams

Punamaeki and Joustie (1998): examined how culture, violence, and personal factors affected dream content among Palestinian children living in a violent environment (Gaza), Palestinian children living in a peaceful area, and Finnish children living in a peaceful area

o Results: dreams of the Palestinian children from Gaza incorporated more external scenes of anxiety, whereas the Finnish children’s dreams had more “inner” anxiety scenes

There are also differences in the role of dreams in different cultures

Tedlock (1992): reported that dream sharing and interpretation was a common practice among Mayan Indians in Central America, and was important in the teaching of cultural folk wisdom

Dream content, the emotions associated with one’s dreams, and dream usage may differ in important and interesting ways in different cultures

Culture and Time

Though objectively should be the same for everyone, cultures experience time differently

Many visitors from cultures in which time is respected and punctuality is cherished have difficulty adjusting to U.S. public transportation systems, which may not always be on time as scheduled

Visitors from other cultures, however, in which time is not so much of the essence and queuing is commonplace, seem less affected by such deviations from schedule, viewing them as trivial and to be expected

Hofstede (2001): suggested that Long- versus Short-Term Orientation was a cultural dimension that differentiates among cultures

o Long-Term cultures delay gratification of material, social, & emotional needs, & think more about the future

o Members of Short-Term cultures think and act more in the immediate present and the bottom line

Pace of life was correlated with several ecological and cultural variables

Hotter cities were slower than cooler ones, cultures with vibrant and active economies were faster, and people in individualistic cultures were faster

Also, people in faster places tended to have worse health but greater happiness Culture and the Perception of Pain

Pugh (1991): culture influences the experience and perception of pain in several ways, including: 1) the cultural construction of pain sensation, 2) the semiotics of pain expression, and 3) the structure of pain’s causes and cures

One hypothesis concerning cultural differences in pain experience has to do with the effect of language on perception and cognition

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the structure of language, which is highly dependent on culture, affects our perceptions and cognitions of the world around us—including our pain experiences

Fabrega (1989): because the structure, content, and process of language differ across cultures, so does the experience of pain

People of different cultures may have different rules governing the expression, perception, and feeling of pain o The rules governing the expression of pain will ultimately affect people’s subjective experiences of pain

Nayak, Shiflett, Eshun, & Levine (2000): level of pain tolerance and acceptance of overt pain expression were linked: The less acceptable overt pain expression was, the greater was the tolerance of pain

CULTURE AND INTELLIGENCE Traditional Definitions of Intelligence and Its Measurement

Spearman (1927): along with the multiple factors of intelligence, a “general” intelligence representing overall mental ability

o This factor, called g, is typically measured through a process of combining and summarizing the various component scores of a multiple-factor intelligence test

This definition of intelligence has dominated its measurement and, consequently, the research in this area

ORIGIN: intelligence tests provided a way to distinguish children in need of special education from those whose schoolwork suffered for other reasons

Immigrants who spoke English poorly and came from different cultural backgrounds were at a disadvantage

Some defended the scientific nature of the new tests, saying that southern European immigrants were not fit to enter the country

Average scores of minority groups in the U.S. are 12-15 % points lower than the average for European Americans

WHY? Is IQ Biologically Predetermined?

Arthur Jensen (1969, 1980, 1981): nature side of the debate argues that differences in IQ scores between different societies and ethnic groups are mainly hereditary or innate

o Found that African Americans typically scored lower on IQ tests than European Americans o Jensen said that about 80% of a person’s intelligence is inherited and suggested that the gap between

the scores of European Americans and ethnic minorities in the United States was due to biological differences

o Argued that special educational programs for the underprivileged are a waste of money, time, and effort because inborn intellectual deficiencies of ethnic minorities are responsible for poor scores

Studies of twins provide some evidence for the nature hypothesis

Bouchard & McGue (1981): compared identical twins who grew up in separate homes to fraternal twins raised together

o Scores of identical twins raised in different environments were significantly more alike than those of fraternal twins raised together

Jensen (1971): correlation between twins on IQ was .824, which he interpreted as constituting an upper limit on the heritability of IQ

Jensen: environmental factors could not have been systematically related to the intelligence levels of twin pairs Is IQ Culturally Determined?

Scholars suggest that members of certain ethnic groups in the United States score lower because most subcultures in this country are economically deprived

Average IQ score of poor whites is 10-20 % points lower than the average score of members of the middle class

Also possible that between-group differences in intelligence scores are the result of (1) different beliefs about what intelligence is or (2) culturally inappropriate measures of intelligence

Claude Steele’s work on stereotype threat—“the threat that others’ judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain”

o Societal stereotypes about a group can actually influence the performance of individuals from that group

o When black students were asked to record their race on a demographic questionnaire before taking a standardized test, they performed significantly worse as compared with black students who were not primed to think about their race before taking the test

o When the same test was presented as unrelated to intellectual ability, the detrimental effects of the stereotype threat disappeared = white and blacks performed relatively equally

Scarr and Weinberg (1976): evidence for an environmental basis of intelligence o Showed that black and interracial children adopted by white families scored above the IQ and school

achievement means for whites

Led to the development of a number of “culture-free” or “culture-fair” tests of intelligence, such as the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test

Evaluating Both Positions

Controversial topic to measure intelligence

Sometimes deemed “unethical” to study

There are problems on both sides of the issue

Nature side: the use of race or ethnicity as a classifying variable is problematic because of the ambiguity of these concepts, which may not actually refer to anything meaningful about biology or psychology

o Whether there are truly distinct races of people is still an unanswered question o Literature suggests that those distinctions really do not exist

Fact is biology itself is influenced by cultural and environmental factors, (long term through evolution and short term as a result of recent social history and even individual experience within a lifetime)

Nurture side: if intelligence really is a cultural construct… o Then it would be impossible to construct a test that is indeed “culture-fair” or “culture-free” o Because such a test would have to include specific items that are generated within a specific cultural

framework o That is, intelligence cannot be understood outside a cultural framework

The Concept of Intelligence in Other Cultures

One of the possible confounding factors in previous studies that documented cultural differences has been cultural differences in the very concept and meaning of intelligence

Many languages have no word that corresponds to our idea of intelligence

Because of the enormous differences in the ways cultures define intelligence, it may be difficult to make valid comparisons from one society to another

Different cultures value different traits and have divergent views concerning which traits are useful in predicting future important behaviors

Another difficulty: tests of intelligence often rely on knowledge that is specific to a particular culture; investigators based in that culture may not even know what to test for in a different culture

Recent Developments in Theories about Intelligence in Contemporary Psychology

Until very recently, for example, creativity was not considered a part of intelligence; now, however, psychologists are increasingly considering this important human ability as a type of intelligence

Gardner (1983): has suggested that there are really seven different types of intelligence: logical mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal

Sternberg (1986): has proposed a theory of intelligence based on three separate “subtheories”: contextual, experiential, and componential intelligence

o Theory focuses more on the processes that underlie thought than on specific thought outcomes o Because this definition of intelligence focuses on process rather than outcome, it has the potential for

application across cultures

Collective intelligence: the general ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks

Intelligence in its broadest sense may be more aptly defined as “the skills and abilities necessary to effectively accomplish cultural goals