Development Across Cultures PDF

Development across cultures PSGY1013– Developmental Psychology Dr. Shue Ling Chong Overview Inherent cultural bias in the field of Developmental Psychology. What is culture? How does cultural understanding develop? Recent research exploring cultural variability in Social Development. Le...

Development across cultures PSGY1013– Developmental Psychology Dr. Shue Ling Chong Overview Inherent cultural bias in the field of Developmental Psychology. What is culture? How does cultural understanding develop? Recent research exploring cultural variability in Social Development. Learning objectives By the end of this lecture you should be able to: Understand how sampling biases have shaped the field of Developmental Psychology. Explain how children learn about culture. Describe research studies which explore the influence of culture on social development. Common Assumptions in Developmental Psychology 1. Development has a specific, universal timeline. 2. Development follows a consistent procedure (maturational, or stage-like) regardless of external factors. 3. Methods used to study development are appropriate in different cultures. Problems with these assumptions Ethnocentric – evaluating other cultures according to preconceptions, standards, and customs of one’s own culture. Bias in who does research: Experimenters ask research questions relevant to their own cultural experience. Bias in who participates in research: Theories confirmed by participants who share the same cultural experience. Methods and tools used to assess different aspects of developmental psychology may be culturally biased because they are developed by, and validated within a single culture. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model (1974) “It can be said that much developmental psychology is the science of the strange behaviour of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time” (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p513) WEIRD SAMPLES, WEIRD researchers Nielsen et al., (2017) Reviewed 1582 articles published in top Developmental Psychology journals between 2006-2010. What is culture? An umbrella term which encompasses social behaviour and norms of human society. Foundations of culture Relatively stable over time, yet variable across communities. Cumulative – knowledge, skills and social conventions passed from one generation to the next. Shaped by social learning. Legare & Nielsen (2015) How do children learn about culture? Young children make use of multiple strategies to learn about culture. These are all features of social learning: Emotion learning. Natural pedagogy (receptivity to demonstrations). Questioning. High-fidelity imitation. (Legare & Harris, 2016) Types of imitation Imitation “Learning to do an act from seeing it done” (Thorndike, 1898) Mimicry “occurs when a person unwittingly imitates the behaviour of another person” (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003) High-fidelity Imitation or Overimitation “copying another's action, despite visible evidence that it is causally unnecessary” (Lyons, 2007)  Overimitation and Culture A series of necessary and unnecessary actions are demonstrated on transparent and opaque puzzle-boxes. Chimpanzees copy everything on the opaque box, but solve the puzzle efficiently in the transparent box. Children copy everything in both opaque and transparent conditions. Learning social convention can sometimes be more important than learning about physical causality. Horner & Whiten (2004) Developing and Maintaining culture Demand characteristic? Children and adults engage in overimitation “in the wild” (Whiten et al., 2016). Social selectivity? Some evidence to suggest children imitate ingroup over outgroup (Krieger et al, 2020) Global phenonmenon? Overimitation has now been demonstrated in children from many countries around the world (including rural Africa, hunter-gatherer societies, other indigenous groups). Maintenance? Children protest when a puppet fails to perform the unnecessary actions (Kenward et al, 2011). How culture impacts Three examples: social development Ownership reasoning (Rochat et al., 2014). ‘Norms’ around sharing (Blake et al., 2015). Sharing and family structure (Weltzein et al., 2019). Ownership reasoning How we relate to material possessions can reflect cultural values: Extent of wealth. Generosity. Political ideals. Ownership concepts develop by 2 years of age (‘it’s mine’): Attachment to objects (Faigenbaum, 2005). Exclusive control over objects (Rochat, 2011).  Ownership and Culture A ‘statistically average’ family with all their possessions in: USA: India: Peter Menzel (1995) Material World: A global family portrait. Ownership and culture (Rochat et al, 2014) Do early intuitions about ownership reflect cultural values or are there universal principles which govern ownership reasoning? 176 3-to-5-year old children from 7 distinct socio-cultural environments: USA, China, Vanuatu, Brazil. Private daycare, public daycare, village, street kids. Rural and urban High, middle and low SES  Ownership and culture (2) (Rochat et al, 2014) Two dolls, who are friends, took a walk together and ended up fighting for possession of an object. Conditions: First contact. Familiarity. Creation. Rich-Poor. Neutral. Children were asked “Whose is it?” Ownership and culture (3) (Rochat et al, 2014) By age 5, children in all cultures consistently attributed ownership in the creation and familiarity conditions. There was no consistent pattern in the first- contact or rich-poor conditions. Children from USA and China were more likely to assign ownership to the poor puppet. Culture and socio-economic context both influence early intuitions about ownership. Fairness Norms (Blake et al., 2015) Children play in pairs, one child is the ‘actor’. Sweets are distributed on the apparatus and the actor chooses to accept or reject the distribution. Rejecting an offer leads to zero payoffs for everyone. Do children reject unfair offers that disadvantage themselves? Do children reject unfair offers that disadvantage others? Fairness Norms (2) (Blake et al., 2015) Low levels of rejection for ‘fair’ offers. As children get older they tend to reject unfair offers when they are disadvantaged by the distribution of resources (except for Mexican children). Fairness Norms (3) (Blake et al., 2015) Low levels of rejection for ‘fair’ offers. In USA, Canada and Uganda, older children reject unfair offers when they are advantaged by the distribution of resources. Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese and Senegalese children are unlikely to reject unfair offers which advantage them. Sharing (Weltzien et al., 2019) What drives differences in resource allocation? Level of cultural specificity: Country level differences. Family level differences. Sharing (2) (Weltzien et al., 2019) 7-to-8-year old Indian children completed a priming interview designed to promote independence or interdependence. Sharing game where they could choose between one of two resource distributions: Take two for self. Divide resources equally between self and another child. Sharing (3) (Weltzien et al., 2019) Independence priming made children choose the selfish option more frequently. Interdependence priming only worked to make children more prosocial if they came from an extended family. Family-level variable was more important than country-level variable. Summary Historical and current bias towards testing children from WEIRD societies may have limited our understanding of Developmental Psychology. Young children are sensitive to culture, and they actively promote and maintain cultural norms, Research studies that examine social development across cultures have highlighted some important universal principles (overimitation, using creation to infer ownership) and other variabilities (development of sharing). Not just country-level analyses are informative when thinking about cultural differences, looking at socio-cultural variability within societies can also be informative.