Luke's Cultural Psychology 372 Blog

 Acculturation refers to migrating to a new culture and learning said culture. Some people go to different cultures permanently, called immigrants, while people who go to new cultures and only intend to stay temporarily, called sojourners. When people initially migrate to new cultures, they initially will fall in love with the culture, this is called a honeymoon phase. During this phase, migrants love the new culture they are in, loving everything about it. After this is the culture shock, where positive feelings are replaced by negative feelings about the acclimated culture. After the culture shock, these negative feelings balance out and feelings about the culture remain even, or go back to positive.  I spent an extended period of time visiting Newfoundland this summer, and I acclimated to the culture considerably. Newfoundland was a very extroverted culture, so I found it quite easy to fit in and get along with the people there because I am by nature an extrovert as well. I...

 Display rules are a social norm that helps us to dictate how and when we express certain emotions, and these norms typically vary across cultures. Canadian culture, for example, expects norms of politeness and kindness, and in certain social settings people are expected to remain calm and quiet. This is what I expected to be the norm of most social life, but I didn't realize that it is different in certain cultures. For example, I visited Greece a few years ago, and the display rules are much different. In Canada walking down the street, store owners stay in their stores or put signs in their windows to attract customers. However, in Greece, store owners loudly advertise outside of their stores, attracting as much attention to them as possible. Building on this, ritualized displays are culture-specific expressions that are used to give a certain social message. This ritual might be culture specific, and appear strange or unusual for people from other cultures. For example, in Cana...

 Blog 5) One concept in class that we discussed that I found interesting was the discussion surrounding group conformity, specifically with the example of Asch's (1956) study. In his study, he asked participants to evaluate a picture of lines of different lengths, and to indicate which one was the longest. However, he placed confederates within the study to purposely give false answers (e.g., saying line B was longest, even though line A was clearly longer). Some participants stuck with their gut and gave the right answer, but a surprisingly high amount participants responded in line with the confederates, so they would not be judged or ostracized from the group. I think that it is super important to always make sure that you voice your own opinion, even when everyone else conforms to a certain opinion that you know is wrong. However, I also understand that it is harmful to relationships to not conform, because the group will form an opinion of you and think less of you even though...

     The Ratchet Effect refers to the idea in cultural evolution that once an evolution or change occurs, specifically a positive change, the behaviour becomes impossible to revert back to the previous behaviour. In the wild, we can see lots of examples of the ratchet effect. A popular one in Nova Scotia is the overfishing of fish in the water around the province. Cod began to be overfished in Atlantic waters in the mid 1900's, to a point where they are now extremely endangered, and cannot reproduce to their old levels, on par with the amount of fishing done to them.     A real world personal experience that I can think of with the  ratchet effect would be working out. When I work out for a consecutive period of time, I get much stronger and lift heavier weights. But when I got injured, I was forced to lift less, and lift lighter weights instead of my usual weight. Even though my body really needed the rest, I still physically and psychologically felt ...

       In class, we learned about the difference between Imitative Learning and Emulative Learning.  Imitative learning focuses on simply copying the actions we observe others doing, such as a teacher or a parent, following an established structure in order to complete a behaviour or achieve a certain goal. However, the main focus is completing the goal, with less focus on understanding the thought behind it. Emulative learning is what happens when you observe someone else perform a certain behaviour, but you do not copy the exact methods used by the teacher. Instead, emulative learning focuses on understanding the reasoning behind the behaviour (eg., seeing a method used to retrieve an object using tool A, but instead using tool B to achieve the same result).     I can think of a variety of examples throughout the course of my life in which I used both imitative and emulative learning to learn concepts and  behaviours. During high schoo...

      In class today, we learned about cultural learning, and the variation between human and animal learning. I was particularly interested in the section in which we discussed human cultural learning. We learned that the human cultural learning ability is not necessarily unique to our species, however we do have specific unique abilities that allow us to have more advanced cultural learning capabilities. These abilities include imitation biases, the speed at which we are able to learn, and other cognitive foundations. I found the concept of learning biases to be very relevant to my life experiences, and I was able to make real world connections as well as connections based on material I had learned in other psychology classes as well.     As we learned, humans, like animals, rely on imitation to learn most things. However, humans are more advanced than animals through their ability to understand intentions behind behaviours, and o...