Psychology of Personality and Culture

Caveats of Culture

• Cultures are complex and diverse, not monolithic
• Cultural differences in group averages do not always fully explain individual experiences
• Language and how people communicate cultural tendencies affect interpretations

Twenty Statements Test: Measure of Self-Concept

• Independent Self: Defining characteristics are unique and independent of others. Boundaries between ingroups and outgroups often relatively fluid and stable. Attributes are inherent.
• Interdependent Self: Defining characteristics are intertwined with relationships and memberships within communities. Boundaries between ingroups and outgroups are often clearly defined. Attributes are fluid and situation-dependent.

Self-Concept in the Brain: Biological

• Activation patterns of interdependent self involve similar brain regions when thinking about oneself versus one's mother
• Independent self shows more activation in the MPFC (medial prefrontal cortex) when thinking about oneself versus one's mother

Carol Dweck; Mindset & Performance

• Fixed Mindset: Children praised for intelligence are more likely to stick with easy tasks to avoid showing lack of innate ability
• Growth Mindset: Children praised for effort are more likely to tackle harder tasks, as they understand ability is changeable via efforts.

Stable vs Fluid Self Concept; Self-consistency

• Individuals are sensitive to cues in their environment regarding how they are judged (effort or innate skill)
• Cognitive dissonance paradigm: independent self is about self-consistency, interdependent self is about peer consistency.
• Descriptions are more positive and stable when respondents are alone.
• Descriptions are more negative when respondents are around their manager.

Self-awareness

• Independent self has subjective self-awareness (focus outward)
• Interdependent self has objective self-awareness (focus inward). Mirrors increase self-criticism in independent, but not interdependent cultures.

Part 2: Motivation

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self-esteem is a universal need.
• Independent Self: Driven by self-actualization and expressing individual uniqueness, with a view to securing individual uniqueness.
• Interdependent Self: Driven by a desire for meaningful connectedness and relationships with others, seeking inclusion in a group.

Self Enhancement Motivation

• High Self-Esteem vs Modesty Tendency: Westerners tend towards inflated self-esteem, while others are more modest. Going back to protestantism.
• Self-Serving Bias: Taking credit for successes and blaming external factors for failures.
• Downward Social Comparison: Comparing oneself to others who are worse off, making oneself feel superior.
• External Attribution of Failure: Blaming circumstances or situations for setbacks.
• Self-Criticism (Effort vs Skill): Focusing on effort and skill rather than comparing oneself to others.
• Prevention vs. Promotion Orientation: Focus on preventing negative outcomes promotes higher persistence in failure scenarios as opposed to Canadians persisting longer under successful conditions as opposed to failure

Mastery Motivation; Agency

• Capacity of individuals to exert control over environment to achieve goals - top of Maslow's Hierarchy.
• Conjoint Agency: Collective agency - where the actions are contingent on obligations and expectations from others (role-fulfillment)
• Individuals act as agents to fulfill their goals and desires.
• Individuals shape reality to fit perceptions, goals and desires.
• Primary control: internal locus of control
• Secondary control: external locus of control

Culture and Personality

• An individual's patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior.
• Internal traits predict behavior, stable across time, contingent on context, different across contexts.
• Universal concepts exist - but contextualization of those concepts may vary among cultures

Etic vs Emic Approaches

• Etic (Universalistic) approach: Aims to find universally applicable concepts and measures across cultures, such as the five-factor model.
• Emic (Culture-Specific) approach: Examines the unique perspectives and concepts individuals have of themselves and their culture, looking for cultural meanings, using indigenous terms or ideas.

Cognitive & Perception

• Culture influences ways individuals perceive environments and relationships (with respect to holistic vs. analytic thinking styles)
• Westerners tend to focus on objects, East Asians on relationships and context

Analytic & Holistic Thinking Styles

• Analytic Thinking: Focuses on objects and their attributes, emphasizing independence and rule-based behaviors associated with cultures with Western Roots.
• Holistic Thinking: Focuses on relations between objects, context reliance and emphasizing interconnectedness, and experience-based approaches typically associated with collectivist cultures

Explicit/Implicit Communication

• Low-context Communication: Relies heavily on explicit verbal communication and clear messages; less dependence on shared knowledge.
• High-context Communication: Relies on shared implicit cultural norms and background contexts, often including non-verbal cues and implicit messages.

Linguistic Relativity

• Languages influence the way people think.
• Concepts can differ across cultures depending on the vocabulary available, but some basic concepts like colors might be universal, like the five dimensions of personality.

Spatial Perception

• Cross-cultural differences exist in spatial reasoning, and cultural perspectives, such as egocentric (individuals' own position) and geocentric perspectives (objective space) influence spatial orientation.

Numerical Cognition

• The way people perceive and process numerical concepts is influenced by culture (for example, East Asians are generally more proficient in mathematical and numerical reasoning problems owing to exposure to abaci).

Emotion & Interpersonal Relations

• James-Lange Theory: Emotions arise from the physiological responses to stimuli.
• Schachter-Singer Two-factor Theory: Emotions are influenced by both physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal, which vary across cultures depending on perceived context and actions.

Similarity-Attraction Effect

• People are more attracted to others they perceive as similar (evolutionarily, this could have been instrumental in preserving group resources).
• This is more pronounced in collectivistic cultures, where social norms and relationships are more closely interconnected.

Emotions & Cultures

• Emotions are culture-specific as appraisal is different across contexts.
• Appraisal influences how emotions are communicated.
• Emotions are the process of interpreting a situation, and those interpretations and related behaviors vary based on environmental contexts where people learn their interpretations.