Luke's Cultural Psychology 372 Blog

     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...

       Today in class, we learned about sensitive periods for cultural socialization, touching on a variety of topics including cultural learning variations, cultural parenting/sleeping variations, and different classifications of attachment styles. I specifically was interested in the effects of parenting styles and their classifications, based on Baumrind’s (1997) research. According to Baumrind, there are 4 different parenting styles, each impacting children exposed to these parenting styles differently. Firstly, there is   Authoritarian parenting,   which is centered around the parents being very demanding, enforcing strict rules and minimal dialogue and showing of emotion.   Authoritative parenting  is the parenting style that maintains high expectations for the child, but also fosters strong personal relationships with the child, and also allows for some limited independence for the child, with a focus on the child’s wellbeing, and was found...