Culture

Definition

Culture can be generally defined as an interrelated set of values, tools, and practices that is shared among a group of people who possess a common social identity. More simply, culture is the sum total of our worldviews or of our ways of living. Cultural worldviews affect a range of psychological processes, including perceptual, cognitive, personality, and social processes, but are thought to most strongly influence social psychological processes.

Background and History

For much of the 20th century, there was scant research and publishing on the subject of culture and behavior in the general psychological literature. Some of the more notable exceptions are seen in the work of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky, and Frederic Bartlett. One influential finding on cultural effects was made by Marshall Segall in the 1960s, who, along with his colleagues, found that Africans and Westerners varied in their susceptibility to certain visual illusions, theoretically because of their differential exposure to built environments and wide vistas. Apart from such isolated cases of research, however, much of the early academic study of the behavioral effects of culture can be drawn from the work of social anthropologists.

Since 1970, social psychologists have paid significant attention to the effects of culture on behavior. This growth was due, in part, to the increased level of intercultural interaction and its associated challenges that occurred with the rapid expansion in global communication, economies, and migration in the intervening period. Advances in social psychological theory and research methodology also facilitated more interest in the study of culture. As a result, knowledge about culture and behavior increased significantly in the latter half of the 20th century, principally through the work of social psychologists like Harry Triandis, Geert Hofstede, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, Shalom Schwartz, and Richard Nisbett, among others.

Current Approaches and Knowledge

Many contemporary social psychologists who investigate the effects of culture do so by comparing national cultures to determine universal and culture-specific patterns of behavior. Cross-cultural research is conducted primarily from the sociocognitive perspective and focuses on the cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes or cultural knowledge that distinguishes the behavior of people with different national backgrounds.

One prominent tool employed by cross-cultural researchers is to classify nations by their relative support for individualism or collectivism. Individualism [Page 211]is a set of values, beliefs, and attitudes that emphasize the importance of people pursuing their individual goals and behavior. Collectivism is manifest in values, beliefs, and attitudes that emphasize the importance of people following group goals and group norms for behavior. Research has shown North American, Western European, and Australian cultures to be relatively individualistic, while Japanese and Chinese cultures are comparatively collectivistic.

Individualistic and collectivistic cultures encourage people to adopt a certain set of interrelated values, beliefs, and perceptions of the self and the group. A person exposed to an individualistic culture is more likely to value personal autonomy, freedom of expression, and self-enhancement than is a person from a collectivistic culture, who would contrastingly be more likely to value obedience, tradition, and group enhancement. In addition, individualistic cultures encourage people to adopt an independent self-view or distinguish the self from others, whereas people in collectivistic cultures view themselves as more interdependent or connected to others. As a consequence, the individual and the group are perceived as the more prominent agent in behavior in individualistic and collectivistic cultures, respectively.

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