schacterbrief3e

1.5 Beyond the Individual: Social and Cultural Perspectives

Social psychology studies how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals can be influenced by the presence of others. Members of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church are often married to one another in ceremonies of 10,000 people or more; in some cases, couples didn’t know each other before the wedding began. Social movements such as this have the power to sway individuals.

Ap Photo/Ahn Young-Joon

Although psychologists often focus on the brains and minds of individuals, they have not lost sight of the fact that human beings are fundamentally social animals who are part of a vast network of family, friends, and acquaintances. Trying to understand people in the absence of that fact is a bit like trying to understand an ant or a bee without considering the function and influence of the colony or hive. People are the most important and most complex organisms that we ever encounter, so it is not too surprising that our behavior is strongly influenced by their presence—or their absence. The two areas of psychology that most strongly emphasize these facts are social and cultural psychology.

Social psychology is the study of the causes and consequences of sociality. Social psychology’s development began in earnest in the 1930s and was driven by several historical events. The rise of Nazism led many of Germany’s most talented scientists (such as Kurt Lewin) to flee to America and to watch from another shore as their homeland was commandeered by a madman who turned their former friends and neighbors into genocidal soldiers. Philosophers had speculated about the nature of sociality for thousands of years, and political scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists had been studying social life scientifically for some time. But these German refugees were the first to generate theories of social behavior that resembled the theories generated by natural scientists, and more importantly, these refugees were the first to conduct experiments to test their social theories. For example, social psychologists who studied conformity discovered that most people will say something they know to be untrue if they see other people doing the same thing (Asch, 1956). Most people will do something that they know to be immoral if they are ordered to do so by an authority figure (Milgram, 1974).

How did historical events influence the development of social psychology?

social psychology

The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.

The symptoms of some mental disorders can be reported differently across different cultures. Cultural psychology studies the similarities and differences in psychological processes that arise between people living in different cultures.

Deco/Alamy

Of course, “most people” meant “most White college-educated North Americans” because those were the people whom early psychologists could most easily study. But people in different places often think, feel, and behave differently, and modern psychologists are interested in those differences. Culture refers to the values, traditions, and beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people. Although we usually think of culture in terms of nationality and ethnic groups, cultures can also be defined by age (youth culture), sexual orientation (gay culture), religion (Jewish culture), or occupation (academic culture). Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). Cultural psychologists study a wide range of phenomena, ranging from visual perception to social interaction, as they seek to understand which of these phenomena are universal and which vary from place to place and time to time (Cole, 1996; Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998). For example, the age of a person’s earliest memory differs dramatically across cultures (MacDonald, Uesiliana, & Hayne, 2000), whereas judgments of facial attractiveness do not (Cunningham et al., 1995). We’ll highlight the work of cultural psychologists throughout the text and in Culture & Community boxes like the one in this section concerning cultural differences in analytic and holistic styles of processing information.

cultural psychology

The study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.

Culture & Community: Analytic and Holistic Styles in Western and Eastern Cultures

Analytic and Holistic Styles in Western and Eastern Cultures The study of cultural influences on mind and behavior has increased dramatically over the past decade. An especially intriguing line of research has revealed differences in how the world is viewed by people from Western cultures, such as North America and Europe, and Eastern cultures, such as China, Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries. One of the most consistently observed differences is that people from Western cultures tend to adopt an analytic style of processing information, focusing on an object or person without paying much attention to the surrounding context, whereas people from Eastern cultures tend to adopt a holistic style that emphasizes the relationship between an object or person and the surrounding context (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005).

This difference is illustrated nicely by a study in which American and Japanese participants performed a novel task, called the framed-line test, which assesses how well an individual incorporates or ignores contextual information when making a judgment about a simple line stimulus (Kitayama et al., 2003). As shown in the accompanying figure, participants saw a line inside a square. They were asked to draw the line again in a new square. Either the line had to be exactly the same length as the original stimulus (the absolute task), or the length of the line in the new square had to be in the same proportion to the height of its frame as the length of the original line relative to the height of the original frame (the relative task). The absolute task engages analytic processing, whereas the relative task draws on holistic processing. The researchers found that American participants living in the United States were more accurate on the absolute task than on the relative task, whereas Japanese participants living in Japan were more accurate on the relative task than on the absolute task. Interestingly, Americans living in Japan performed more like Japanese participants, and Japanese living in the United States performed more like American participants. While we don’t yet know how long it takes for a culture to produce a shift from an analytic style to a holistic style or vice versa, research on cultural influences continues to develop rapidly, and we are even beginning to obtain some clues about how differences between individuals from Eastern and Western cultures are realized in the brain (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011).

SUMMARY QUIZ [1.5]

Question 1.18

1.	Social psychology differs most from other psychological approaches in its emphasis on

human interaction.
behavioral processes.
the individual.
laboratory experimentation.

Question 1.19

2.	Cultural psychology emphasizes that

all psychological processes are influenced to some extent by culture.
psychological processes are the same across all human beings, regardless of culture.
culture shapes some but not all psychological phenomena.
insights gained from studying individuals from one culture will only rarely generalize to individuals from other cultures, who have different social identities and rituals.