• Culture shape the many norms we have in our lives Ex: distance of talking space.
  • There is no good evidence for such kinds of population differences in genes underlying differences in ways of thinking.
  • People acquire culture through socialization

 

Universal Brain Develop into Culturally variable minds 

  • Fundamentally our nature is that of a cultural being.
  • Our universal biological foundation is shaped by our experiences, such that we are able to thrive in an extremely broad array of cultural environments

 

Sensitive Periods for Cultural Socialization 

  •  Sensitive Period: a period of time in an organism’s development that allows for the relatively easy acquisition of a set of skills
  • There is a trade-off between an organism’s ability to learn new behaviors that suit its new environment, and its abilities to specialize in behaviors that are effective in particular environments
  • Developmental transitions indicate the existence of a sensitive period.

 

Sensitive Periods for Language Acquisition  

  • Humans are capable of using 150 phonemes
  • But we don’t use more than 70 of them
  • Many phonemes that are used in various languages are not used in other languages
  • We come into this world able to recognize all kinds of sounds
  • Within first year of life, children begin to lose the ability to distinguish between closely related sounds that are not in their own language
  • We are biologically prepared to attend to human speech as soon as we come into the world and it predisposes us to start picking up language at an early age.

 

Sensitive Periods for acquiring Culture  

  • Cultural knowledge is acquired, not born with it
  • People had a difficult time acquiring new cultural information after the age of 15
  • Cultural learning is quite similar in timing to peoples ability to acquire a second language

 

Cultural Difference in psychological processes emerge with age

  • With age, people from different cultures diver in their psychological experiences

How do Early Childhood experiences differ across cultures? 

  • People are socialized into their respective cultural worlds by participating in specific cultural practices and institutions

 

Infants’ Personal Space

  • One of the most influential sources of cultural influence is the actual personal space within which we exist.
  • In the movie babies, monogolian babies were swaddled up so tightly
  • European babies had less physical contact but more face-to-face contact
  • Babies that get massages will walk on their own early
  • Also babies that scoot instead of crawl start walking early
  • Parenting decisions are moralized by others
  • Different sleeping arrangements that were preferred between the two cultures tells us much about the underlying values of the cultures.

o People prefer the whole girls in one room and boys in one room sleeping arrangements.

  • Want to avoid:
  • incest avoidance americans and Indians want to avoid that
  • protection of the vulnerable – young children who are needy and vulnerable should not be left alone.
  • Many more reasons why the 3 rooms were Mom+Dad, All girls, All boys.

 

Parenting Styles 

  • Authoritative parenting leads to the most desirable outcome sin terms of perceived parental warmth, acceptance, better school achievement, autonomy, and selfreliance.
  • There are different parenting styles depending on stage of development of the child
  • What might look like cold behavior in one culture is not perceived as cold in another Ex: Westerners are more affectionate towards their children, kissing them and telling them they love them whereas Asian parents don’t do that.
  • Authoritarian parenting styles have been found to lead to increased psychological maladjustment among children across a variety of both Western and non-Western cultures.
  • Children are less happy with strongly controlling parents, and this is viewed in many cultures.
  • Whether strict and controlling parenting will yield desirable outcomes overall is dependent on what values a culture prioritizes.
  • In North Americans, parenting styles that the child take the lead, and look at it through their perspective is very common and affective because they are showing empathy.

 

Noun Biases 

  • First words young children tend to know are nouns
  • The noun bias does not appear to be as universal at it was originally
  • Chinese speaking college student did not show this bias, whereas American student did (when they were asked to remember a conversation between mother and child)
  • This cultural difference suggest there is a linguistic explanation for this
  • Ex: To say to someone in Japanese that someone ate a cookie, you would say she cookie ate or to say I love you in Japanese , you can just say love
  • Cultural differences in noun biases simply reflect how various languages highlight nouns and verbs differently.
  • Westerners tend to perceive the world in more analytic fashion whereas East Asians are more likely to perceive the world in holistic terms
  • It is plausible that the cultural difference in the noun bias reflect this difference in thinking about the world.
  • It appears that early worlds of infants and toddlers vary in systematic ways.
  • Western children are directed to attend to objects, whereas East Asia children are directed toward the relation among objects.

 

 Difficult Developmental Transitions 

  • Terrible Twos
    • The idea that children pass through a difficult transition during their early toddler years is viewed as a hallmark of development, for North Americans. o At 2 years old, there is a noncompliant and oppositional behavior from the children
    • The tantrums of the terrible twos are seen to serve an important function in the young child’s socialization to be a mature, verbally assertive individual.
  • Adolescent Rebellion o Violence seems to be associated with adolescence
    • This is because of the hormonal changes associated with puberty o Adolescence itself is not a cultural invention and seems to be an existential universal
    • All cultures view adolescence as a distinct period of life, which some restructuring and role learning is occurring. o Adolescence is not a functional universal.

 

Socialization Through Education 

  • Humans are dependent on their ability to acquire cultural information
  • Schooling leads people to think in ways that are different from the thought processes of people who do not experience formal schooling
  • Education also seems to facilitate abstract logical reasoning, the ability to apply a rule on the basis of logical principles rather than on the basis of personal experience or familiarity.
  • With education, comes a heightened willingness to consider information beyond what one has experiences or heard about firsthand, and to apply logical principles to it.
  • This is a shift from concrete to the abstract
  • Also we consider how much of our intellectual capability is sustained by knowledge that is built into the ways that problems are framed.
  • Schooling led the children to process information in a more efficient manner – it affects how people think

 

Case Study: East Asians and Math Education 

  • How societies opt to educate their children reflects their implicit beliefs about what kinds of knowledge are most important
  • The educational strategies that a culture adopts influence the ways its citizens think
  • East Asians children spent more days in school and a greater percentage of class time was devoted to math education in the Asian school day than in the American
  • USA kids had less homework assigned then the Taiwanese kids, this shows that teaching differences are important role in how children learn math
  • Lastly, Asian parents view education as more central to their children’s lives than do American parents.
  • The cultural differences in performance also seem to be related to the expectations of children and their mothers.
    • American mothers are far more satisfied with their children’s performance whereas Asian moms are not.
  • Math performance can be traced to the languages themselves
    • Numbers are harder to learn in English than in Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, because there are more irregular number words in English
  • Education shapes the way people think, but education practices themselves are also shaped by cultural attitudes, values, and even features of language.