Culture and Socialization: Human Behavior and Brain Function

Culture and Socialization

• Humans are not rational and have natural drives to be altruistic, with an aversion to inequality.
• The Cingulate Cortex is integral to the Limbic System, generating maternal response, empathy, emotional expressiveness, and motivation to communicate.
• Healthy humans suffer depression, reduced immunity, and even die without communication.
• Our 'selves' are created through communication, and our culture, society, and institutions are produced and reproduced through communication.

Nature or Nurture?

• The debate is resolved by recognizing that both nature and nurture work together in complex ways.
• Twin studies show that heritability (genetic), shared environment, and non-shared environment all play a role in shaping personality traits.
• Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself.
• Genes are inherited, but how/if they are expressed may be impacted by the environment, and can be passed generationally with or without socialization.

Socialization

• Socialization is key, and humans interact from the moment they are born to acquire cognitive and emotional skills to get along in their society.
• Erving Goffman's dramaturgy theory suggests that people observe social roles, rehearse them, and become who they are through interaction.
• There are three main types of socialization: primary, secondary, and anticipatory socialization.

Agents of Socialization

• The four main agents of socialization are:
  • The Family: parenting behavior can overcome risk factors.
  • The Media: transmits stereotypes, violence, sex, and morals, and can teach consumerism.
  • The Peer Group: extremely important in adolescence, expanding experience beyond family.
  • School: transmits norms, values, roles, and ideas of authority.

Culture

• Culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution, organization, or group.
• It is primarily based in language, which influences the way we think about reality (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
• Culture is not monolithic, stagnant, or definitively bordered.

Semiotics

• Semiotics is the study of signs, which create meaning through the combination of signifier and signified.
• Humans think only in signs, and anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as signifying something.
• Our vocabulary of signs comes to us through communication and may restrict our thought and ability to perceive.

Cultures

• There are various cultures, including Western, Eastern, Arabic, African, European, North American, East Asian, Indian, and Latin.
• Cultures mix and interact, but on what terms, and at what cost to cultural diversity and biodiversity?

Art and Aesthetics

• Aesthetics refers to judgments on sentiment, style, and taste, which are constantly changing and diverse.
• Why do aesthetics change and diversify?