Chapter 17.docx

**Chapter 17** **Culture and Personality (27)** **What Is Cultural Personality Psychology?** Within-group similarities and between-group differences can be of any sort---physical, psychological, behavioral, or attitudinal. These phenomena are called **cultural variations.** **Cultural personalit...

**Chapter 17** **Culture and Personality (27)** **What Is Cultural Personality Psychology?** Within-group similarities and between-group differences can be of any sort---physical, psychological, behavioral, or attitudinal. These phenomena are called **cultural variations.** **Cultural personality psychology** generally has three key goals: (1) to discover the principles underlying the cultural diversity; (2) to discover how human psychology shapes culture; and (3) to discover how cultural understandings in turn shape our psychology **Three Major Approaches to Culture** Psychologists have developed three major approaches to explaining and exploring personality across cultures: evoked culture, transmitted culture, and cultural universals. **Evoked Culture** Evoked culture is defined as cultural differences created by differing environmental conditions activating a predictable set of responses. Note that two ingredients are necessary to explain cultural variations: (1) a universal underlying mechanism (in this case, sweat glands possessed by all people), and (2) environmental differences in the degree to which the underlying mechanism is activated (in this case, by differences in ambient temperature). Neither element alone is adequate for a complete explanation. **Evoked Cooperation** Under **high-variance conditions**, there are tremendous benefits to sharing. You share your meat today with an unlucky hunter, and next week he or she will share meat with you. Environmental conditions can activate some behaviors, such as cooperation and sharing. Everyone has the capacity to share and cooperate, but cultural differences in the degree to which groups do share and cooperate depend, to some extent, on the external environmental conditions, such as variance in the food supply. **Early Experience and Evoked Mating Strategies** Children in uncertain and unpredictable environments, in short, seem to learn that they cannot rely on a single mate and, so, opt for a sexual life that starts early and inclines them to seek multiple mates. In contrast, children growing up in stable homes with parents who predictably invest in their welfare opt for a strategy of long-term mating because they expect to attract a stable, high-investing mate. **Honors, Insults, and Evoked Aggression** Nisbett has proposed that the economic means of subsistence of a culture affects the degree to which the group develops a culture of honor. Presumably, all humans have the capacity to develop a high sensitivity to public insults and a capacity to respond with violence. These capacities are evoked in certain cultures, however, and presumably lie dormant in others. **Cultural Differences in Conformity** The concept of evoked culture provides one model for understanding and explaining cultural variations in personality traits, such as conformity, cooperativeness, or aggression. It rests on the assumption that all humans have the same potentials or capabilities. The aspects of these potentials that get evoked depend on features of the social or physical environment. **Transmitted Culture** Transmitted culture consists of ideas, values, attitudes, and beliefs that exist originally in at least one person's mind that are transmitted to other people's minds through their interaction with the original person. **Cultural Differences in Moral Values** many moral values are specific to particular cultures and are likely to be examples of transmitted culture. They appear to be passed from one generation to the next, not through genes but through the teachings of parents and teachers or through observations of the behavior of others within the culture. **Cultural Differences in Self-Concept** Our self-concepts affect how we present ourselves to others and how we behave in everyday life. Research shows that self-concepts differ substantially from culture to culture. Markus and Kitayama (1991, 1994, 1998) propose that each person has two fundamental "cultural tasks," which have to be confronted. The first **is communion, collectivism,** or **interdependence**. This cultural task involves how you are affiliated with, attached to, or engaged in the larger group of which you are a member. Interdependence includes your relationships with other members of the group and your embeddedness within the group. The second task---**agency, individualism, or independence**---involves how you differentiate yourself from the group. Independence includes your unique abilities, your personal internal motives and personality dispositions, and the ways you separate yourself from the group. The process of adapting to the ways of life in one's new culture is called **acculturation.** there is empirical support for the claim that people in different cultures have different self-concepts. Presumably, these different self-concepts are transmitted through parents and teachers to children. **Criticisms of the Interdependence--Independence and Collectivist--Individualist Concepts Cultural Differences in Self-Enhancement** **Self-enhancement** is the tendency to describe and present oneself using positive or socially valued attributes, such as kind, understanding, intelligent, and industrious. Tendencies toward self- enhancement tend to be stable over time. **Do Cultures Have Distinctive Personality Profiles?** Most studies reveal that stereotypes about national personality rarely correspond to average levels of actual assessed personality. **Personality Variations Within Culture** Within-culture variations can arise from several sources, including differences in growing up in various socioeconomic classes, differences in historical era, and differences in local evoked or transmitted culture. There is some evidence, for example, that **social class** within a culture can have an effect on personality. Lower-class parents tend to emphasize the importance of obedience to authority, whereas higher-status parents tend to emphasize self-direction and nonconformity to the dictates of others. even though cultures can differ in their average level on a particular trait, many individuals within the one culture can be higher (or lower) than many individuals in the other culture. Another type of within-culture variation pertains to the effects of historical era on personality. People who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, might be more anxious about job security, adopting a more conservative spending style. **Cultural Universals** In this section, we consider three examples of cultural universals: beliefs about the personality characteristics of men and women, the expression of emotion, and the possible universality of the five-factor model of personality traits. **Beliefs About the Personality Characteristics of Men and Women** the universal beliefs about the differences between men and women in personality may reflect actual differences in personality. **Expression of Emotion** Cultural variability in the presence or absence of emotional words has been interpreted by some personality psychologists to mean that cultures differ in the presence or absence of actual experiences of these emotions. But Pinker notes that whether a language has a word for a particular emotion or not matters little if the question is whether people experience the emotion in the same way: Tahitians are said not to have a word for grief; however, "when a Tahitian woman says 'My husband died and I feel sick,' her emotional state is hardly mysterious; she is probably not complaining about acid indigestion" The view that language is not necessary for people to experience emotions may be contrasted with what has been called the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which contends that language creates thought and experience. In the extreme view, the Whorfian hypothesis argues that the ideas that people can think and the emotions they feel are constrained by the words that happen to exist in their language and culture Darwin interacted with peoples on five continents to give detailed information about how the natives expressed various emotions, such as grief, contempt, disgust, fear, and jealousy. He summarized the answers he received: "The same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity; and this fact is in itself interesting as evidence of the close similarity in bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races of mankind" some emotions are universal across cultures such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise. **Five-Factor Model of Personality** The fifth factor(openness) , in summary, appeared to be somewhat variable across cultures.