Social Psychology of Culture

Chi-Yue Chiu, Ying-yi Hong

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317710172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As the speed of globalization accelerates, world cultures are more closely connected to each other than ever before. But what exactly is culture? It seems to be involved in all psychological processes, but can its psychological consequences be studied scientifically? How can cultural differences be described without reifying culture and reinforcing cultural stereotypes? Culture and mind constitute each other, but how? Why do humans need culture? How did the evolution of the mind enable the development of human culture? How does participation in culture transform the mind, and how does the mind process and apply culture? How may culture become a resource for pursuing valued goals, and how does culture become part of the self? How do culture travelers navigate cultures and negotiate multiple cultural identities?

The authors of this volume offer a refreshing theoretical perspective and organize seemingly disparate research evidence into a coherent body of psychological knowledge. With its accessible language and lively narrative, this volume engages its readers in an intellectual journey through the fascinating research literatures in psychology, anthropology, and the cognate disciplines.

This book will make an ideal textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate courses on psychology and culture, cultural studies, cognitive anthropology, and intercultural communication.

1
What Is Culture?

Contents at a Glance

Culture in the News

The Concept of Culture in Historical Context

Categories of Culture

Material Culture

Social Culture

Subjective Culture

Integration

Definition of Culture

Shared Knowledge

Network of Shared Knowledge

Production of Shared Meanings

Distribution of Shared Meanings

Reproduction of Shared Meanings

A Collection of Interconnected Individuals

Organization of the Book

What is Social about Social Psychology of Culture?

Culture in the News

At about 11:20 a.m. on Tuesday April 20, 1999, two boys named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with guns and homemade bombs. The boys entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In the next few minutes, they killed 13 people and wounded at least 24 others, before turning their weapons on themselves. Later, it was discovered that these boys were fond of violent video games.

In response to the Colorado school massacre, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the First Lady of the time, said, “When our culture romanticizes and glorifies violence on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in songs, and where there are video games that you win based on how many people you kill, our children become desensitized to violence and lose their empathy for fellow human beings.”

On the other side of the political fence, Republican leaders also called for a national dialogue on youth culture to inform the nation about modern culture and its impact on youth (Boston Herald, April 28, 1999).

Both Democrats and Republicans viewed youth culture, the culture of video games, or the culture of violence as the first cause of the Colorado shootings.

*****

On December 2, 2001, energy giant Enron, which had grown into one of the United States’ largest companies in just a little over 15 years, filed for bankruptcy protection in New York. This is the largest bankruptcy and one of the most shocking failures in American corporate history. Enron’s rapid growth was based on artificially inflated profits and dubious accounting practices.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on August 28, 2002 with this headline: “Enron executives created culture of stretching limits.” According to this article, Enron’s corporate culture is the prime mover of the company’s success as well as its dramatic demise: “It was a characteristic gesture inside Enron, where the prevailing corporate culture was to push everything to the limits: business practices, laws, and personal behavior … This culture drove Enron to dizzying growth, as the company remade itself from a strong energy business to a futuristic trader and financier. Eventually it led Enron to collapse under the weight of mindbogglingly complex financial dodges” (p. C4).

*****

Edward Rothstein, a New York Times columnist, began his article entitled “In a word, culture means anything, bad as well as good” with the following observation on public discourse:

What led to the horrendous behavior of the convicted policemen in the Abner Louima case? What caused the killings of high school students in Littleton, Colo.? Why did welfare often fail to change the underclass into the working poor? Why has Microsoft been so ruthless? And why do so many American students perform so poorly on standardized tests?

Culture.

A culture of police conduct; a culture of racism; a culture of violence; a culture of video games; a culture of poverty; a culture of corporate aggression; a culture of permissiveness; a culture of capitalism; a culture of multiculturalism.

(Rothstein, June 12, 1999, New York Times, p. B1)

To Rothstein, this roster suggests that on the one hand, the word culture has been denatured to the point of meaninglessness. On the other hand, culture has been invoked to explain almost every phenomenon in contemporary American societies. To him, culture appears to be at once everything and nothing. It is a villain at large, a con artist that must be subverted, unmasked, and contested.

In academic discussion, culture also appears to be an elusive concept that is given a tremendous amount of authority over people’s acts and thoughts. Culture derives its original meaning from Latin: from cultura, which referred to the cultivation of the soil. In Latin, cultura also acquired a secondary meaning: cultivation of the soul (Barnard, 1968). In the Western history of ideas, the proliferation of meanings of culture has led a 20th century writer to complain that any attempt to encompass its meaning in words “is like trying to seize the air in the hand, when one finds that it is everywhere except within one’s grasp” (Lowell, 1934, p. 115). In a classic review of the concept, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) brought more than 160 definitions to light.

In spite of the lack of consensus on the meaning of culture in the social sciences, researchers insist that culture has an enormous influence on almost every facet of people’s life, ranging from personal tastes to manners, beliefs, values, worldviews, and actions. Indeed, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) compared culture to the concepts of gravity in physics and disease in medicine.

For culture to be a useful explanatory construct in the behavioral sciences, we must first unveil its identity. For decades, anthropologists and psychologists have contested the meaning of culture. To grasp the meaning of this elusive concept, they have debated numerous definitional issues. Two of these issues are of primary concern in the present chapter. First, what does culture consist of? Second, what are the characteristics of culture? Intense discussions on these issues have helped to clarify the nature of culture. From different researchers’ attempts to address these issues, the reader will begin to see the face of culture, or at least part of it, unmasked.

The Concept of Culture in Historical Context

Like other concepts in social sciences, the concept of culture has a history of its own. The term culture has different meanings in different intellectual traditions and in different historical periods. To situate the meaning of culture in historical contexts, before we consider any definition of culture, we will briefly review how culture was conceptualized in the writings of the early and contemporary anthropologists.

The English term culture came into use during the Age of Exploration and Colonization in the 15th century, when many countries of Western Europe began sending explorers around the world to look for new sources of wealth. As noted, culture is derived from the Latin word, cultura, which is connected to the practice of nurturing domesticated plants in gardens. In the 19th century, upper-class Europeans used the term culture to refer to the refined tastes, intellectual training, and mannerisms associated with the upper classes. During the same period, influenced by Charles Darwin’s influential theory of biological evolution, British social philosopher Herbert Spencer proposed a theory of cultural evolution. According to Spencer, human societies developed over time, advancing toward perfection. Through the process of cultural evolution, stronger and more advanced races and civilizations replaced weaker races and societies. In the late 19th century, American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan posited that all aspects of culture (including family structure, marriage, kinship categories, forms of government, technology, strategies of food production) changed as societies evolved. In other words, various aspects of culture were tightly woven together and interrelated. Like his contemporaries, Morgan believed that Europeans were the biologically advanced people. The notion of cultural evolution had provided an intellectual justification for European nations’ attempts to dominate the world through colonization. As Said (1991) observed, 19th century scholars considered the Orient as a vast region including most of Asia and the Middle East. The Orient was considered to be a cohesive whole, and a prototypic Oriental was depicted as feminine, weak, and yet strangely dangerous. The stereotypic image of the Oriental was liberally applied to justify European domination of the inferior races in the Middle East and the Far East.

In the early 20th century, American anthropologist Franz Boas revolutionized the study of culture by emphasizing the uniqueness of all cultures. According to Boas, the culture of any society must be understood as the result of the society’s unique history, and not as a stage in the evolution of societies. At about the same time, French sociologist Emile Durkheim advanced a functional perspective. He emphasized the adaptive value of culture, and analyzed how elements of culture served to keep the society functioning. Between the 1930s and 1960s, some American anthropologists, including Alfred Kroeber, Julian Steward, Leslie White, and Marvin Harris, viewed culture as the result of human adaptation to the natural environment and changing technology. Their research focused on how ecological, economic, and technological factors shaped people’s beliefs and thinking style.

Starting from the 1960s, students of culture shifted their attention away from the universal logic that underlies the development of human cultures. Inspired by the work of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and others, researchers turned their interest to ethnographic analysis of the way a human group assigns specific meanings to objects, behaviors, and emotions.¹

In short, there are four major intellectual traditions in the study of culture: theories of cultural evolution, ecological theories, functional theories, and ethnographic theories. As these traditions evolve, they have undergone major changes. For example, the early ethnocentric bias is no longer evident in contemporary cultural evolution theories. It is not hard to discern the influence of these intellectual traditions in contemporary research. For example, Dov Cohen and his colleagues have examined how confronting the problem of self-protection in the lawless Old South fostered the development of a culture of honor, which shapes the development of legal institutions in the southern states of the United States, as well as the emotional and behavioral responses of American Southerners (Cohen, 1996, 1998; see Chapter 7). Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have demonstrated pronounced differences in the thinking style of East Asians and European Americans. Such differences, according to Nisbett (2003), are related to differences in the ecological environment in East Asia and North America (see Chapter 5).

Some psychologists have adopted a functional approach to culture. Their research has illustrated how culture may serve important evolutionary, cognitive, and social functions (Schaller & Crandall, 2004). Other psychologists have focused on how culture provides a shared frame of reference for making sense of reality (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). The perspective of culture as shared meanings or knowledge raises the question of how cultural knowledge is applied in specific contexts, an issue that has attracted tremendous research interest in the social psychology of culture.

Categories of Culture

One way to define culture is to determine what culture consists of. What constitutes culture depends on how culture is conceptualized. If culture develops from a human group’s adaptive response to the natural environment, the economy, and technology, an important component of culture is the material culture (Harris, 1964). Material culture consists of all material artifacts produced by human beings, including strategies of food production, the economic system, and technology. If culture is developed to maintain basic social functions in a human group, the social culture, which consists of all social institutions and shared rules of social conduct, should be an important part of culture (Keesing, 1974). Finally, if culture is a system of meanings, it should consist of shared beliefs, values, and ideas, which give rise to a unique way of thinking about the world (Geertz, 1973; Goodenough, 1961; Schneider, 1968). This body of shared knowledge constitutes the subjective culture (see Figure 1.1).

Material Culture

Material culture includes among other things the methods by which people exchange and share goods or services, and technology. Contemporary capitalist societies have organized markets for almost every kind of commodities. People in smaller societies exchange goods through systems of barter and reciprocal sharing. Some cultures use fairly simple technologies for work. For example, horticultural groups use plant materials such as tree bark to make clothing. By comparison, much of the material culture in large modern societies consists of mass-produced industrial goods, such as home

FIGURE 1.1. Symbols of material culture (a), social culture (b), and symbolic culture (c) in traditional China: (a) Replicas of bronze vessels and other artifacts from ancient China; (b) Entrance to one of the three major colleges that prepared candidates for civil examinations; (c) A statue of Confucius, whose ideas have greatly influenced China's intellectual tradition.

entertainment systems and computers. In countries throughout Africa, many people build houses of sun-dried mud brick and thatch, whereas high-strength steel and glass furnish the giant skyscrapers in cosmopolitan urban cities in North America and Western Europe. The aspect of material culture that has received most research attention is the strategy of subsistence or the methods by which people in a society obtain and produce food.

Subsistence Strategy

Societies differ in the primary strategies of subsistence.² In most modern societies, agriculture is the major strategy of food production. Agriculture may take the form of small-scale peasant farming, plantation agriculture, and large-scale mechanized grain farming. People in industrial and commerce-based countries are generally familiar with large-scale food production made possible by expensive machinery, great quantities of chemical fertilizers and pestici...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Chapter 1 What Is Culture?
• Chapter 2 Strategies for Describing Culture
• Chapter 3 Psychological Foundation of Human Culture
• Chapter 4 What is Culture For?
• Chapter 5 Culture as Mental Habits: Shared Unintended Thoughts
• Chapter 6 Culture, Self, and Others: Who Am I and Who Are They?
• Chapter 7 Events and Norms: How Events Unfold and What We Should Do
• Chapter 8 Organization and Application of Cultural Knowledge
• Chapter 9 Reproduction of Culture and Cultural Change
• Chapter 10 Intercultural Contacts: Implications for Cultural Competence
• Chapter 11 Globalization and Multicultural Identities
• Chapter 12 Scientific Study of Cultural Processes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index