The Spanish General Knowledge Norms

Frontiers in Psychology

Jon A. Duñabeitia¹ 

关键词: general knowledge;    Spanish norms;    cross-language comparison;    cultural norms;    memory recall;    false belief;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01888

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

One of the building blocks of culture is general knowledge—culturally valued and cross-generational knowledge about historical facts. Possession of an elementary level of this knowledge is regarded as indispensable and has even become a key part of many naturalization tests. It is broadly assumed that the citizens of many countries worldwide should know the answers to a number of civics questions. Astonishingly, knowing the answers to questions such as “Who was the first U.S. President?” is viewed as an indicator of how well someone could integrate into a country. This speaks volumes to the importance of general knowledge. However, the facts that are deemed general knowledge depend to a great extent on the country, since the study of civics and culture is nearly always specific to a particular territory. As a result, there are no universal sets of cross-cultural general knowledge norms in academia. This is an impediment that further highlights the need to constantly update and validate these norms across different languages and countries. In the present paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by adapting U.S.-centric general norms to a Spanish-speaking population and testing them with a large sample of college students in Spain.

【 授权许可】

CC BY