Luke's Cultural Psychology 372 Blog

 Secularization theory suggests that as our societies modernize, we use our modern scientific thinking and reasoning skills to base our decisions and judgements off of instead of religion. Because of this, religious belief levels decline. This is true for some parts of the world, but not for others. Modern westernized countries are more secularized than rural places. Kohlberg proposed a theory of 3 different kinds of morality in his theory of moral development: The preconventional level, which is the level that children use. Conventional thinking is used by most adults, and post-conventional moral reasoning is used by people in western societies, people in rural settings don't have that kind of reasoning, such as rural tribes, etc.  Our ability to use post conventional reasoning is very important for creating positive change in the world. At my high school, I tried to create a campaign for a political party at my school, with a club to support it. However, the school had certa...

 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...