Culture’s Influence on Behavior and Cognition: Key Studies
Introduction: Culture’s Impact on Behavior and Cognition
It is argued that cultural origins can affect behavior, but the extent of accuracy of these theories is questionable. Both the strengths and limitations of these theories will be considered in this essay and will be supported with appropriate studies.
In simple words, culture is a set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next. Behavior refers to observable expressions, like apparent actions, facial expressions, and verbal responses, while the concept of cognition refers to processes such as memory, perception, thinking, problem-solving, language, and attention (which are mental processes).
The central issue in this question is whether we can accept that cultural origins can accurately explain behavior and that cultural origins truly affect cognition, and if so, to what extent this applies.
Cultural Origins and Behavior: The Case of Conformity
Looking at the effect of cultural origins on behavior, our focus here is the effect of culture on conformity as a behavior.
Understanding Conformity: Asch’s Classic Study
Asch investigated the extent to which pressure from a majority could convince a single participant to conform in a situation where the majority’s decision was wrong. He did this using a line judgment task, where he placed one naive participant in a room with seven to nine confederates, who had agreed to their answers in advance. Conformity in this context is the tendency to adjust one’s behavior in ways that agree with those of others.
Collectivist cultures foster cohesiveness and are more likely to conform than individualistic cultures where ties between people are looser.
Cross-Cultural Conformity: The Takano and Sogon Replication
Aim of the Study
Takano and Sogon investigated this. The aim was to investigate the rate of conformity of Japanese participants in a replication of Asch’s classic conformity study.
Methodology
The method consisted of 300 Japanese college students who belonged to the same non-sports college clubs. The participants were split into 40 groups of nine participants, with each group having just one naive participant. Asch’s line matching task was presented, and in 2 out of 18 trials, the confederates unanimously answered incorrectly on purpose. In all trials, the naive participants sat in the last position.
Key Findings
The results showed that 23% conformed. No systematic relation was found between conformity rate and duration of club membership. The rate found in the results is much the same as the average conformity rate among Americans in the same experimental setting.
Strengths of the Research
- The background research before the replication of Asch’s experiments considered differences between collectivist countries like China, Japan, and South Korea.
- The method used meta-analysis of previous research, highlighting differences in attitudes between Japanese and Americans, but also Japanese and Koreans, and other collectivist nations. Their careful analysis gives a strong theoretical background to their study.
- Additionally, the Japanese participants used were residents in Japan, which increased reliability.
Limitations and Critical Considerations
- The study had participants mainly from one university in the capital city. This is an issue because conformity may have been different in other parts of the country.
- Also, there were large differences between the participants’ conformity rates, which are overlooked because of the mean scores; other measures such as median or mode may have shown this better.
- To be more critical, one must wonder whether the results of the experiment could be said to lack ecological validity, because comparing lines under lab conditions is not a usual activity.
Cultural Origins and Cognition: Focus on Memory
Looking at the effect of cultural origins on cognition, our focus here is the effect of culture on memory. While memory is clearly a universal process, types of remembering and the way in which we remember have been shown to be affected by culture.
Investigating Autobiographical Memory: Wang’s Study
Aim of the Study
Wang investigated this. The aim was to investigate autobiographical memory for childhood events in three cultural groups: US, England, and China. Also, to investigate the role of gender in autobiographical memory.
Methodology
The method consisted of a volunteer sample of 100 college student participants from the US, 105 from England, and 95 from China (210 females and 90 males) who were recruited. The study was conducted in their native language. Participants met with an experimenter in small groups and were asked to recall as many childhood memories of events (from when they were 5 years old or less) as they could in 5 minutes. Once they had remembered, they dated the memory, putting down how old they were to the nearest month when the recalled event occurred. They rated each memory on a five-point scale regarding:
- How often they thought/talked about the memory.
- How personally important the recalled experience was to them.
- How detailed and clear the memory was.
- How emotionally intense the experience was.
- How negative or positive the experience was.
- The source of the memory (from self or others).
Key Findings
The results showed that although all cultural groups recalled more memory events that occurred in the later years of the infantile amnesia period, the rate of increase of reported memories varied across cultures. US participants recalled the greatest number of childhood memories, followed by participants from England, and lastly, China. Additionally, a significant gender effect emerged, where women in all cultures recalled more childhood memories than men did across the five-year period. Wang concluded from the results that infantile amnesia differs in its extent across cultures because in his study, the Chinese remembered the least, the British remembered more than the Chinese but less than the Americans, and the Americans remembered the most. Researchers argue that the differences observed must be largely due to cultural influences. Additionally, women generally remembered more than men; this may be a result of the effect of socialization, as previous studies have shown that parents engage in more elaborate memory conversations with daughters than with sons. Therefore, both the types of self-construal in a culture and the cultural narrative practices may shape memory development and directly affect autobiographical memory. This has a clear relationship to cultural schemas in the shaping of memory.
Strengths of the Research
- It is a controlled experiment that acknowledged that while there may be other variables that affect autobiographical memory, many of these, such as storytelling practices, attitudes towards children, and self-construal, are culturally shaped.
- The recorded memories were analyzed using several relevant factors (amount of rehearsal, personal importance, vividness, emotional intensity, whether the event was negative or positive, and whether it was remembered personally) to draw conclusions.
Limitations and Critical Considerations
- It is possible that other variables affected the autobiographical memories of participants: if participants had more access to adventures, individual exploration, and exciting events at an early age, this may result in a richer autobiographical memory. A more restrictive culture with behavioral inhibitions may result in fewer memories. This may be the cause of the difference between China and the US that was not explored.
- To be more critical, one must wonder if participants had enough time to collect their thoughts because the pressure of trying to recall early childhood events within a short five-minute period could have resulted in false memories and temporary loss of memory.
Evaluating Theories: Culture’s Role in Psychology
When evaluating the theories that cultural origins can explain behavior and cognition, one must consider if these theories reflect facts. While the theory that cultural origins affect conformity (a behavior) explains why the Japanese (a collectivist culture that is evolving) showed conformity, it does not fully explain why their conformity rates were not much higher than those of Americans (an individualistic culture). As for the theory that cultural origins affect memory (a cognitive process), while the theory is useful in explaining why certain cultures may remember more childhood events than others, it cannot necessarily make such general predictions without acknowledging other factors that are difficult to isolate.