Chapter 4

Question 1

How to decide which cultures to study?

Answer 1

• Shotgun method: choosing randomly (but can be difficult to interpret results if no theory guides selection)
• Choose based on theoretical variable you’re investigating (ex. Collectivism → choosing cultures clearly different in collectivism)
• Choose based on finding universality (ex. Choosing two very different cultures → if for ex, theory of mind is consistent, good evidence for universality)

Question 2

how to design studies to make meaningful cross-cultural comparisons

Answer 2

Understand the culture you’re studying (ie. customs) → learn via texts, ethnographies; collaborate with a researcher from that culture; cultural immersion

Question 3

methodological equivalence

Answer 3

• having your methods perceived in identical ways across cultures (sometimes requires using different procedures for each)
• • Because of the challenges of achieving this, most research has taken place in industrialized societies

Question 4

issues of using university student samples

Answer 4

• Generalizability (does it generalize to other populations in the sample?)
• Power (ability to detect an effect → not a powerful enough contrast between students in industrialized nations)

Question 5

neuroscience methods

Answer 5

• fMRI: tracking changes in brain’s blood oxygen levels indicating activation of different parts of brain
• EEG: measuring electrical information indicating activity

Question 6

methods particular to studying culture

Answer 6

• situation sampling
• cultural priming
• culture-level measures

Question 7

situation sampling

Answer 7

• one way in which our culture affects us is by providing us with particular kinds of situations → if researchers can see how people respond to situations regularly experienced by people in another culture, they can get insight into how cultures shape people’s ways of thinking
• 2 steps: one cultural group describes specific situations they’ve experienced; another cultural group reads them and is asked to imagine how they would have felt in those situations

Question 8

cultural priming

Answer 8

making certain ideas associated with cultural meaning systems more accessible to participants to investigate what happens when people start to think about them (ex. Giving Chinese participants an independence primer and seeing how that influences their descriptions of themselves)

Question 9

culture-level measures

Answer 9

measuring cultures themselves in ways that are objective, replicable, and quantifiable (ex. Examining cultural messages middle-class Americans are exposed to through the types of songs they listen to and what messages are included in those songs)

Question 10

unpackaging

Answer 10

identifying the underlying variables that give rise to cultural difference (WHY might we expect these differences to occur?); using theory, finding observed differences that may explain, and demonstrating that these differences relate to each other

Question 11

case study: culture of honour in the southern US

Answer 11

• Why does the US south seem much more violent than the North?
• Nisbett & Cohen argue that it’s because historically there have been more herders in the south, who lived a precarious existence since if their herds got stolen their wealth vanished overnight, giving rise to a violent culture of honour (striving to protect reputation through aggression) → you want to have an aggressive reputation to prevent people from stealing your livestock
• Looked at archival data supporting that argument-related murders is higher in rural south than rural north, homicide higher in farming areas, surveys found southerners more accepting of violence to protect family, physiological measures of testosterone when insulted, behaviour measure of how long participants waited before moving aside to let someone else pass, field experiment showing southerners more sympathetic to someone who had killed someone else to defend honour