Culture and Memory

• Culture significantly influences behavior, cognition, and social interactions, shaping how different groups perceive and remember the world.

Culture and Memory

• Culture impacts memory encoding and retrieval processes.
• Cultural schemas influence how individuals process cognitive inputs, affecting cognition.
• War of the Ghosts study : British participants altered a Native American story to fit familiar cultural schemas.
• Brown and Kulik's research demonstrated flashbulb memories varying across cultural groups in the U.S.
• Black Americans were more likely to remember civil rights activists' assassinations due to higher emotional impact.
• Emotional significance of flashbulb events is culturally shaped and impacts memory.

Individualism/Collectivism and Memory

• Cultural dimensions, especially individualism/collectivism, affect the age of first memory recall.
• Childhood amnesia is a common phenomenon where early childhood memories are limited.
• Individualists often recall personal memories earlier than collectivists.
• Cultural systems shape the meaning of memory, influencing recollection.
• Individualistic cultures emphasize independence and individuality.
• Collectivist cultures focus on interdependence and harmony.

Culture and Autobiographical Memory

• Detail and longevity of autobiographical memories differ between individualistic and collectivist cultures.
• Autobiographical memories are a specific type of episodic memory with an individual focus and are influenced by culture during encoding, storage, and retrieval

Mullen (1994) - Culture and Earliest Memories

• Mullen (1994) studied earliest memories across three cultural groups.
• The study used questionnaires to investigate relationships between birth order, gender, culture, and age of earliest memory.
• Earliest memories for Asian and Asian-American participants were, on average, six months later than for Caucasian-American participants.
• First-born children and females tend to have earlier memories than males and later-born.

Mullen (1994) - Theorized Connections

• This phenomenon could be caused by individualism/collectivism and early linguistic experiences.
• Individualist cultures encourage children to elaborate narratives with themselves at the center.
• Parents in individualist cultures emphasize independence and individuality.
• This is supported by a follow-up study in Korean
• Cultural dimensions impact memory through linguistic experiences.

Mullen (1995) - Parent-Child Interaction

• Cultural dimensions impact memory through linguistic experiences
• Ways parents talk to children about their own experiences influences how those events are remembered
• Mullen (1995): Caucasian mother-child pairs talked about the past three times more frequently than Korean pairs.

Culture and Intuitive Thinking

• Culture influences cognition beyond memory, affecting thinking styles (intuitive vs. rational)
• Richard Nisbett's "The Geography of Thought" links Asian and Western cognition differences to philosophical traditions.
• Geographical factors, such as agricultural traditions, trace back differences in cultural practices.
• Ara Norenzayan's research encompasses several studies, including cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive thinking explored by Nisbett.

International Mindedness

• Culture has a significant influence on how individuals think and relate
• Understanding cultural variations and similarities in cognition contributes to international mindedness

Intuition vs Logic

• Norenzayan et al. (2002) : Western thinking is categorized as more rule-governed and less intuitive than East Asian thinking
• Slanting towards intuition affects knowledge acquisition in various Areas of Knowledge (TOK lens)

Knowledge and culture

• Way of knowing used to construct knowledge within an Area Of Knowledge can change the nature of that area of knowledge
• Series of experiments conducted on university campuses in North America and Asia involving European-American, Asian-American and East Asian students.
• A rational or intuitive approach yields different answers to the question of whether the Pope can be unmarried: “Is the pope a bachelor?”

Preferences for rational vs intuitive thinking

• Cultural factors play a big part
• Study at the University of Michigan with a mean age of 19, to decide which fictitious group a target object belonged to
• 52 European-Americans, 52 Asian-Americans and 53 East Asians participated.

Example Stimulus

• A rule – Group 1 is composed of flightless birds
• Family resemblance – Group 2 is composed of polar birds, including three penguins and a puffin
• Figure 5 is an example of a similarity judgement task, but the actual stimulus sets in Norenzayan et al. (2002) were hand-drawn similarity judgement tasks

Classification

• Participants in the classification condition, were asked, for each stimulus set, to decide, “which group the target object belongs to”

Similiarity Judgement

• Participants were asked, for each stimulus set,to decide, “which group the target object is most similar to”.

Results

• Similarity judgements by rule vs family resemblance
• East Asian participants favoured family resemblance answers more than Western

Cultural differences in cognition

• Role of debate in decision-making in Western cultures
• Role of consensus-building in Eastern culture decision-making
• Pedagogical practices and styles of education, with Western cultures emphasising critical-thinking and Eastern cultures emphasising experience
• Differing philosophical traditions, with Western cultures influenced by Greek philosophy with an emphasis on logic and Eastern cultures influenced by Taoist philosophies emphasising intuition

Cultural Studies

• European-American participants were more familiar with the experimental methods used to conduct the study, and therefore performed differently as a result of this.

The Big Picture

• Psychological science increasingly focused on culture by the 1970s, emphasizing cultural variations and commonalities.
• Cultural psychology significantly grew over the years.

How cultural psychology works

• Universalist perspective assuming that human psychology is largely the same for everyone, regardless of culture
• Relativist perspective assuming that psychology varies with culture, and therefore the psychology of any given culture can only be understood in its own cultural context
• Emic perspective in cultural psychology takes an insider’s viewpoint
• Etic perspective takes an outsider’s viewpoint

Two Major Processes

• Cultural and cognitive effects
• Process of enculturation describes how individuals learn and acquire the appropriate skills and cultural norms relevant to their native or heritage culture
• Process of acculturation is perhaps even more relevant to psychology in a globalised world, as it examines the ways in which individuals learn the skills and cultural norms of a new culture.

Perspectives in cultural psychology

• The science of cultural psychology is characterised by a wide variety of approaches with many overlaps in several domains of psychology.
• Cultural psychology is not so much a paradigm of its own as it is a lens that can be used to understand the influence of culture on individual attitudes, identity and behaviour

Main Ideas of Cultural psychology

-Universalist and Relativist Perspective

• Etic or Emic Perspective

Universalism/Relativism

• A universalist perspective on cultural psychology assumes that psychological theories and concepts apply to individuals in the same way, regardless of their culture
• A relativist perspective proposes that psychological concepts and theories cannot be applied across cultural groups, because these differ so substantially.
• A relativist perspective essentially assumes that psychological processes are specific to cultural groups, so one culture cannot

Emic/ETIC perspectives

• Emic approaches provide an insider’s perspective- This kind of research usually focuses on one culture at a time, in order to gain understanding of behaviour specific to that culture.
• Etic approaches provide an outsider’s perspective. This kind of research tends to make comparisons across cultures- In doing so, it determines whether some psychological phenomenon is culturally universal, or culture-specific

Emic Examples

• Examining psychology from specific cultural context
• Subjective view of humans thoughts, feelings and interactions within a culture
• Researcher puts aside psychological theories and let local data do the talking

The Study

• Berry’s (1967) study on conformity in the Temne and the Inuit
• Tried to get inside those cultures, to understand conformity in collectivist versus individual cultural contexts
• Study started out emic, focused on a specific culture

Etic example

• Examining psychology from view point of people outside a certain cultural context
• More objective perspective
• A researcher who takes an existing theory or conceptual framework and conducts research to see if it applies to a new setting or population, is taking an etic approach

Differences in study analysis

• Hofstede’s cultural dimensions might be the most universal theory so far, especially because it was developed using hundreds of cultural groups for cross culture comparison. -Bond and Smith (1996) were looking for cultural universals in conformity

Enculturation

• Process where an individual gains explicit knowledge and appropriate cultural skills to function within the given group.
• Process is undetectable till self awareness
• Inviduals are enculturated by the time they are cognitively aware
• Main agents are parents
• Enculturation is the process of learning the behaviours, characteristics and norms of the culture that they belong to
• Enculturation is how an individual is enfolded by others

Role of enculturation

• Creates cultural transmition from one generation to the next
• Can be quite similar to socialization, however it is less specific
• Examples in teaching include school dress codes and home work
• A child that goes from individualist to collectivist learns it whether they have been taught or not

How is enculturation practiced?

• Parenting styles
• Children's beliefs
• Individual that is old enough can be encultured in different ways

Social Indentity Therory Vs Enculturation

• Enculturation Leads to invididuals own sense of their own social groups
• Theory and encultation
• Enculturation has more impact on what social group thinks and what groups they wish to join
• More likely a child born in south korea will identify with south koreans

Comformity Vs Enculturation

• Conformity is one of the most prevelant ways to acquire social behaviour
• Social behaviour in social and sociocultural group

Social Congnitive Theroy vs enculturation

• Learning through observation
• Imitating parents is an important part of this process
• Exam tip: Focus is always on enculturation
• Learning through observation is relevant

Odden and rochat study

• Observational learning in samosa
• Participatory learning in western culture

Western Culture Vs Samosa learning

• Egalitarian
• Child orientated
• Samosa is demeaning of parents
• Actively trying to teach child to learn

Odden and rochat experiment

• 26 Children
• 4 to 12
• Village life
• Longitudinally
• 22 boys
• 5 to 12
• Cultural learning of sussistence fishing

Observation

• Children in follow up intreview reveal children where learning through observation as opposed to interaction

• The children where never directly told how or what to do

• By the time they were six the students already knew the characteristics of their role

• Triangulation strength is the study

• This is is the samosa way

Memory and enculturation?

• Cognitive theroy helps us understand
• Research from mary mullen helps us understand where we weenculturated a memory

Two - system Thkinikgn and Ecnulturation

• Cultural variation has more impact on way of society thinking

Review

Different cultural differences in thinking may have been enculturated by other factors beyond philosophical traditions: • Decision-making in Western cultures is guided by debate; in Eastern cultures it is instead guided by consensus-building. • Western educational styles emphasise critical thinking; Eastern educational styles emphasise experience.

Acculturation

• Influence of factors can be influenced by enculturation
• Difference is where culturation happens
• Acultration is what happens in other culture to other cultures to other cultures in each interactions

Types of Acculturation

• Social identity theory
• Conformity
• Memory
• Thinking

Aculturation Therios

• Since 1970 many theroris has been porposed
• Largely taken place by socailogists and anthropologists

Accultration Frame Work

• Samm berry from 2010
• Understanding why each group meets Framework
• 2 cultures have to interact togather
• Both cultures have to change to some degree
• Invuduals have to acuturatte of the point a psychological level Emotional and behabviourally
• Acultration somilation vs adaptions
• Acuturation is though of as somulation
• How culture influences each other
• Wide variety and all groups go through aculturation

Why groups adapt?

• Social identity theory, which helps them create a favourable self-image Some psychological theorists consider the development of social identity to be a cognitive process related to mental representations of self. However, in IB Psychology, social identity theory falls very clearly under the sociocultural approach.
• Individuals sorts to see see if culture

How do people aculutrate?

• Integraction is more more effect in achieving some goal

Sam and Berry's (2010) theorized four main acculturation strategies

• Integration - individuals maintain their heritage culture, but interact with other groups and adopt some norms of the new culture. • Assimilation - individuals adopt the norms of the new culture, and do not maintain their heritage culture identity. • Separation - individuals maintain the norms of their heritage culture, and do not adopt the norms of the new culture. • Marginalisation - individuals do not maintain their heritage culture, do not interact with other groups and do not adopt norms of the new culture

• Each of the Aculteration Stragies is further linked to autruture

Acculturative thinking - Ara Norzayan Study

• Euopre are more reliance on logical thinking
• Asiains are more reliant on intuition
• Students move away from social norms

Berry - Al Study

• Studied youth with adaptions

Studied 26 cultural back ground across 13 countries

• There were 7997 participants overall, including 5366 immigrant youth and 2631 national youth. • Ages ranged from 13-18, with a mean of 15.3. • Sampling took place in major cities; immigrants and nationals were sampled from the same neighbourhoods. • Included both first-generation and second-generation immigrants. • Slightly more girls (52.1%) were included than boys

• Used studcture quesitons like questionare and used a group with class Analized to generate immigration profile

Immigration Profile

• Integration, follows for aculturation
• National, foller assimilation strategy Ethnic profi. separation Diffusive, followed un clear

Match previoulsly Adaption gender can be a thing

Inteaction is the best strategy if it is likneldy or

seperatoin helped when

• Culture maintanice is importnat

• Aculutration needs to apply over all

• Some studies are to narrow Over acultration has helped School is good context for people it adapt

Major Acultrations

• Gloalization wil assimilate
• Global indvial wil develop social grouops

Influence of technilogicaly is importnat as there was influence in intculture

Explore how culture shapes memory encoding, retrieval, and flashbulb memories. The 'War of the Ghosts' study illustrates cultural schemas affecting cognition. Individualism and collectivism influence the age of first memory recall and childhood amnesia.