Culture Within: An Exploration of the Effects of Social Class and Region on the Self and Cognitive Habits.

Social Class;Culture;Individualism/Collectivism;Analytic vs. Holistic Cognition;Frontiers;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Varnum, Michael E. W.Sanchez-Burks, Jeffrey Gene ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Social Class;    Culture;    Individualism/Collectivism;    Analytic vs. Holistic Cognition;    Frontiers;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86371/mvarnum_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Culture’s psychological impact stretches from some of the most basic perceptual processes to higher order reasoning. Yet much less is known about the impact of group differences within cultures due to factors such as social class, geographic region, or religion. Exploring within-culture differences not only provides insight into the psychological consequences of these factors, but can also inform our understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural differences operate and are maintained.In Chapter 2, I explore the effects of culture and social class on cognitive habits (attribution, patterns of visual attention, and reasoning about change) and symbolic representation of the self. Russians demonstrated more holistic cognitive patterns and less symbolic self-inflation than Americans; people from working-class backgrounds demonstrated more holistic cognitive patterns and less symbolic self-inflation than those from middle-class backgrounds. Furthermore, for both group comparisons, cognitive differences were partially mediated by differences in self-inflation, suggesting a common mechanism may underlie both group differences.In Chapter 3, I examined whether social class differences in causal inference might be due to relatively automatic or controlled processes. Previous research has found that cultural differences in causal inference appear to be due to differences in early-stage processing of personality-relevant information. Using an ERP paradigm, we found results for social class that were largely parallel to the previously observed cross-cultural difference, suggesting that differences in attribution related to culture and to social class both likely arise from automatic inference processes. In Chapter 4, I tested the voluntary settlement hypothesis by exploring regional variation in naming practices both withinthe US and Canada and comparing countries recently settled by Europeans with European countries. The voluntary settlement hypothesis (Kitayama, et al., 2010) holds that areas that were more recently frontiers both select for individuals who are more independent and promote independent values and behaviors. I found that popular names were less prevalent in US states and Canadian provinces that were more recently frontiers. The same pattern was observed comparing countries recently settled by Europeans with European countries, suggesting that the settling of frontiers has led to parallel differences both across and within countries.