Culture

Chapter 2
Definitions
• Operational definition of culture from psychologists like Hofstede,
Kashima, and Phinney, acknowledging the anthropologists and others
from whom they drew inspiration: Cultures are constellations of
thought and behavior characteristic of a particular group of people
that are transmitted nongenetically and survive for an extended
period of time, and by which meanings and identities are created and
shared.
• Geert Hofstede (1980), one of the pioneers of cultural psychology, described culture as
“the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one
group from another” , using a computer analogy to distinguish cultural components,
which would be software, from the neural structures of our brains that would be
analogous to the hardware.
• We will see, however, that even our neurons are pruned and shaped by culture,
optimizing them for a particular set of stimuli.
• Yoshihisa Kashima (2008), a social psychologist from Japan, describes culture more
abstractly as “an enduring and shared system of meaning” . He continues, “Clearly,
people coordinate their activities in their daily living with their shared understandings
about institutions, practices, symbols, and concepts”
• . Ultimately, human life is a shared process, however one approaches the description.
• Social transmission is repeated learning by new individuals from
generation to generation, and it fuels both continuity and change.
Social transmission involves two phases: learning, during which a new
individual stores a process in memory, and reproduction, when the
learned pattern is replicated by the learner (Tamariz & Kirby, 2014).
• Social learning describes the acquisition of information or skill by new
individuals, typically transmitted between related individuals of the
same species (Box & Gibson, 1999). An unknown number of species
share information socially—for instance, teaching their young how to
find sustenance or to avoid becoming food for another creature.
Three aspects of social learning
• In imitation, the learner copies the actions of the demonstrator as exactly as possible,
whether each action is relevant or not. In emulation, it is actions leading to a
consequential result that are reproduced, with less accurate replication of specific
motions.
• Nielsen (2006) demonstrated that humans emulate outcome achievement at 12 months
and progress to exact imitation by 24 months. Imitation and emulation can happen with
or without the awareness or participation of the individual providing the model behavior.
• New parents learn this quickly when toddlers reach for hot pans or use naughty words
they heard the parents say.
• Teaching, on the other hand, happens when a more experienced actor intentionally
conveys knowledge or skill to a less experienced one. Teaching requires conscious
participation of the teacher in transmission
• All three forms of social learning involve mirror neurons, a special
class of neurons found in primates, including humans, that fire in
sympathy to observed actions.
• When one monkey (or human) observes another taking a purposeful
action, neural activity of the observer/learner reflects the neural
activity involved in actually doing the task. Mirror neurons provide a
basic mechanism for understanding actions of others because action
and perception are connected at the cortical level.
• Evolutionary development of these mirror neural structures probably
facilitated the appearance of more complex imitation abilities, leading
to human language and culture (Arbib, 2011).
• The ability to coordinate socially via mimesis (imitation, copying, or
reproduction), including imitation of actions and replication of
meaning, forms a likely mechanism for the rapid advancement of
hominids that began about two million years ago.
Social diffusion
• More recent research looks beyond transfer between one individual and
another, investigating how information and skills move within and
between groups.
• Social transmission occurs on group levels among several primate species,
providing data for comparison with humans. In the wild, primates have
been observed to develop new behaviors that are then transmitted to
other individuals and to other groups
• Humans engage in social diffusion on a constant basis. Children can
observe a modeled behavior and pass on the learned task with 100%
success. That task can then be transmitted to other children by
subsequent learners who never see the original model
Over imitation
• The puzzling tendency of humans to copy all parts of a process,
including irrelevant steps, and even when shortcuts are available, is
termed overimitation.
Over imitation experiment
• In their first experiment, 16 Brisbane and 16 Bushman (African) children were presented with a series of boxes
that had a toy inside, along with an irrelevant wooden dowel. Experimenters observed whether they (a)
discovered how to open the box and (b) used the object to do so.
• Half of the children were randomly selected to see an experimenter open the box by first performing an irrelevant
action that had no effect, and then using the object to open the box in an inconvenient way. The other half saw no
demonstration.
• Children in the demonstration condition overwhelmingly reproduced the irrelevant and inconvenient actions,
while those who saw no demonstration did not. There was no difference between Brisbane and Bushmen children
by group.
• The second study included 62 Bushmen children of a wider age range, to check for age effects. Demonstration was
by community members, to be sure the effects were not due to the ethnicity of the experimenter/modeler.
• Otherwise, objects and procedures were the same, except that the no-demonstration group subsequently saw the
demonstration and were given another try.
• The children again overwhelmingly copied the irrelevant actions, including 10 from the no-demonstration group
who had spontaneously figured out how to open the boxes more efficiently by hand, then added the irrelevant
actions after observing the modeler.
• Humans across cultures go to extremes to copy a model they want to be like,
replicating much more than just the desired behavior. Humans are especially faithful
imitating an admired role model for instance a famous actor or sports figure.
• The overimitation is probably an unconscious strategy to emulate the success of the
model, the learner copying the desired activity (e.g., basketball) and also how the
model talks, dresses, and behaves.
• This leads to successful marketing of shoes that might actually be relevant to athletic
success and of clothing or fragrance lines that are arguably irrelevant to the figure’s
fame; fans will buy both.

• Overimitation also leads to concern over criminal and violent behavior by role models
and media publicity of such events.
Why over imitation
• One is simply that overimitation enables the learner to succeed even
if she does not know how the action leads to the goal.
• Overimitation increases the sense of similarity between model and
observer and increases the sense of affiliation
• overimitation formed an avenue to demonstrate that one fits in,
confirming membership and affiliation.
Tradition vs culture
• A tradition has been defined as “a distinctive behavior pattern shared
by two or more individuals in a social unit, which persists over time
and that new practitioners acquire in part through socially aided
learning” (Fragaszy & Perry, 2003, )
• Whiten (2005) suggests that the presence of multiple traditions in
different domains is required to meet a minimal definition of culture,
such as practices of agriculture and religious ritual.
Social intelligence
• Humans possess cognitive skills not found in even the nearest of primate relatives,
especially regarding our ability to manage life in large groups and to collaborate on
overcoming major obstacles. Intelligence is often equated to problem-solving ability,
• Humans have the ability to create distinct cultural groups with specific artifacts and
practices forming multiple traditions.
• Humans learn these in complex social interactions, including acquisition of language and
math skills.
• The ability to navigate the social world and use social processes to learn a vast array of
skills very quickly within a cultural setting differentiates humans from other primates,
forming the basis of the cultural intelligence hypothesis (Herrmann et al., 2007).
• This specialized cultural intelligence provides a more comprehensive explanation of
humanity’s unique achievements than general intelligence.
Evoked culture
• Ecologically, a culture may be located in a desert or a jungle. There
may be plentiful fish or buffalo. Humans respond to these situational
factors by creating new behaviors such as fishing, resulting in what
Tooby and Cosmides (1992) term evoked culture—cultural elements
arising in response to external factors.
• Because cultural transmission is inherently a social process affecting
the thoughts and behaviors of those involved, and because
transmission drives both continuity and change, this is where culture,
psychology, and evolutionary theory converge.
Alex Mesoudi
• Alex Mesoudi (2009) argues that human culture itself forms an evolutionary system subject to
Darwinian principles of variation, competition, and inheritance.

• 1. Variation: Within and between groups, knowledge and information differ. People hold
different values and beliefs, exhibit different behaviors and language use, etc. Some variations
are more adaptive or more successfully transmitted than others.
• 2. Competition: All transmission of knowledge, skills, and so on is not equally successful for two
reasons. Because humans do have limits in attention and cognitive resources, errors and
alterations emerge. Also, not all information is equally effective or desirable, and more adaptive
information may be more likely to be preserved. Ultimately, some cultural information survives
and some does not.
• 3. Inheritance: We learn cultural information from models around us, receiving and transmitting
both faithful information and novel variations between models and learners across generations.
Core concepts of cultural dynamics The core concepts of cultural dynamics are as follows:

• There exists cultural information.

1. Cultural information is instantiated in a material form that can be
communicated from a sender to a receiver.
2. The receiver learns (or relearns if the receiver has already learnt it
before) cultural information via a communicated form.
3. The distribution of cultural information within a population results
in this population’s group characteristics. (Kashima, 2008, p. 109)
• Kashima (2008) describes two categories of information shared.
• 1. Content information includes concepts about objects, events,
practices, and other matters of the world context.
• 2. Identity information regards interpersonal relationships, including
memberships in groups and who one is in those groups
• Psychologists have observed a number of biases in informational
content. \
• One is bias toward social as opposed to nonsocial information. In
other words, we like to talk about people and relationships.
• Mesoudi et al. (2006) demonstrated that people are more accurate in
transmission of gossip, which they defined as pertaining to “intense
third party social relationships” , than other types of information.
That accuracy implies that social information may be more important,
or that mechanisms of transmission or reception favor social
information
Social transmission of stories
• Bebbington and colleagues (2017) studied bias toward negative information in
transmission with 368 Australian university students, using serial reproduction of a
fictional girl’s flight from the UK to Australia.
• The story included unambiguously positive and negative events, along with several
ambiguous ones, to see whether positive or negative information was preferred
and whether resolution of ambiguous details tended toward negative outcomes.
• Results showed that negative events survived multiple transmissions better and
that negative resolutions of story events increased as the story was repeated.
• This may also be an evolutionary adaptation; in acquiring new information,
information about negative events could be more important to survival than
positive information. It might be nice to know about a tasty new berry to eat, but
knowing whether something is poisonous is crucial.
People like ,masala in stories
• A great story mixes normal life, needed so people can relate, with
unexpected or strange elements, referred to as minimally
counterintuitive ideas (MCI)
• If the story spreads and the idea becomes commonplace, such as
killer robots eventually manifesting with the invention of drones, the
MCI becomes less memorable and culture moves on
Culture-Specific Concepts of Group
Interaction
• Dong and Liu (2010) identify the concept of guanxi as crucial in understanding how
business and business management work in China. The term refers to reciprocal
relationships and networks developed via common origins, interests, and experience,
nurtured by exchange of favors and consideration.
• Understanding of guanxi, and painstaking development of a guanxi network, allows
Chinese managers to achieve results more quickly because of their networks of
interconnections and collection of favors given and owed (Farh, Tsui, Xin, & Cheng,
1998).

• A related concept is xinyong, or personal trust (Leung, Lai, Chan, & Wong, 2005). Xinyong
is similar to the Western concept of personal integrity, that a man’s word is his bond.
Leung and colleagues stress the importance of this concept in doing business in the
People’s Republic of China
Culture change
• Modernisation
• Acculturation
• Thankyou