In your daily life, you take a lot of things for granted; certain behaviors are so common that you give them little thought. Consider these:

There’s nothing surprising about these examples. It’s normal to learn a person’s name, to treat a gift as personal property, and to get a medical prognosis from a doctor. Pretty much everyone you know does these things and believes them to be appropriate.

In any large group of people, there inevitably are beliefs about people, social settings, and the world at large that all essentially share. People’s shared beliefs, and the social practices that reflect those beliefs, constitute a group’s culture.

Knowing the cultural beliefs and practices of your group is essential for navigating everyday life. Cultural knowledge enables you to figure out what things mean (Geertz, 1973). Without this knowledge, everyday circumstances can be baffling. Tourists, for example, often lack this knowledge and experience culture confusion (Hottola, 2004). When traveling in a new part of the world, they notice that their native cultural knowledge does not fully apply to their current circumstances. Everyday encounters—such as forms of introduction to strangers, eye contact and how it is interpreted, conversational topics that are judged to be private, daily schedules and expectations regarding punctuality (Spradley & Phillips, 1972)—violate tourists’ expectations, leaving them baffled.

Cultures vary; what is commonplace in one may be taboo in another. For example, you might think people always say their name and ask for yours when introduced. But they don’t. On the Indonesian island of Bali, names traditionally have been “treated as though they are military secrets” (Geertz, 1973, p. 375). Balinese introduce themselves instead by referring to their place in their community (e.g., “I am the village chief”) or family (“I am the mother of the village chief”). This social practice reflects the culture’s great valuing of community and family ties (Geertz, 1973).

The other behaviors listed at the beginning of this section also vary culturally. In some cultures outside the United States, people view property as shared rather than personally owned. A child might see a toy, or an article of clothing, as family property rather than personal property (Trumbull, Rothstein-Fisch, & Greenfield, 2001). Regarding medical prognoses, in some Southeast Asian cultures, people do not want one. They believe that “only God knows when someone will die naturally.” The implication is that “the only way a physician could know when someone will die is if that physician planned to kill the patient” (Galanti, 2000, p. 336).

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Now that you’ve read about cultural variability, think back for a moment to the material earlier in this chapter. The social psychology experiments discussed had something in common. Did you notice it? Almost all of them were carried out in the same culture, namely, that of the United States or Western Europe, or what is generally called “Western” culture. Would the research have yielded the same results in different cultures?

For many years, social psychologists rarely asked this question. They assumed that their research results would be the same anywhere in the world. More recently, however, the field of cultural psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993) has emerged, grown rapidly, and questioned this assumption. (The growth is evident in the Cultural Opportunities features that appear throughout this book.) Cultural psychology is a branch of psychology that studies how the social practices of cultures and the psychological qualities of individuals mutually influence one another. Let’s revisit one of the topics explored earlier, attribution, and view it through the lens of cultural psychology.

CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES

In 1984 psychologist Joan Miller ran a study that, in some respects, looked like a traditional attribution experiment. She asked participants to explain some everyday actions. Based on fundamental attribution error research, you would expect her participants to overestimate the causal impact of people and underestimate the impact of situations. Miller, however, took an extra research step: conducting the study in both the United States and southern India. Hers was a cross-cultural study, that is, research in which identical research procedures are executed in different cultures.

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Her work identified cultural differences in attribution. People in the United States primarily explained other people’s behavior in terms of person qualities, for example, “That’s just the type of person she is” (Miller, 1984, p. 967). Citizens of India, though, more frequently made attributions to social context; for example, “The man is unemployed” or “She did not have the [social] power” to act differently (Miller, 1984, p. 968). In India, then, the fundamental attribution error was not nearly as evident as in the United States.

Subsequent research confirmed this finding. When making attributions about the causes of events such as crime or sports performance, people in countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia are less likely than Americans to attribute behavior to personal dispositions; they more frequently cite situational factors (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002).

Why do the cultures differ? One possibility is differing cultural beliefs and practices (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1995). In the Western nations of North America and Western Europe, the dominant culture is individualistic—one that emphasizes individual rights to pursue happiness, speak freely, and “be yourself.” Many Eastern (e.g., South and East Asian) nations have collectivistic cultures, which emphasize individuals’ ties to larger groups (or “collectives”), such as family, community, and nation. Collectivistic cultural practices highlight the obligations of the individual to his or her society.

Different cultures foster different ways of thinking (Nisbett et al., 2001). People who develop in collectivistic cultures tend to think holistically. In holistic thinking, people pay attention to the overall setting—the physical and social environment—within which events occur. Individualistic cultures, by comparison, promote analytic thinking, in which people focus on the qualities of an individual person or object, in isolation from its context.

The holistic/analytic distinction explains the cultural variation in attribution discovered in the study by Miller. The holistic thinking of Eastern cultures draws people’s attention to situational factors rather than to qualities of the person whose behavior is being explained. As a result, people consider situational factors when explaining behavior, thereby avoiding the fundamental attribution error.

Brain research provides additional evidence that cultures differ in analytic and holistic thinking (Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008). The research participants, Americans of either European or East Asian (primarily Chinese) ancestry, were shown a series of stimuli. Some were “target” stimuli on which participants focused most of their attention. Others were contextual stimuli, that is, visual information that was part of a background context. On some trials, the background context changed unexpectedly. EEG recordings measured the degree to which participants’ brains responded to this change. Findings showed that the brains of East Asian Americans changed more; their brains responded more strongly to changes in background context (Figure 12.8). This means that different cultural practices (individualistic and collectivistic) can produce not only different thinking styles (analytic and holistic), but also different types of brain activity in members of the cultures.

Now that we have seen how the study of the brain can deepen one’s understanding of culture and thought, let’s focus our attention on social cognition and the brain.

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