Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [240]
The following are a few of the many other subjects on which cultural psychology is influencing the study of human development:42
—Do different languages cause people to think differently? Apparently not, but the issue is still undecided.
—Does culture influence the creation of one’s sense of self? Apparently yes: The evidence indicates that in an individualistic culture such as our own, the growing and maturing individual develops an independent sense of self—one guided by one’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions. In contrast the collectivist cultures in which three quarters of the world’s population live, rate the rights and responsibilities of the group higher than those of the individual and tend to generate a collectivist sense of self—one guided by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.
—Do genes or culture account for the fact that only 4.1 percent of Chinese children and 10.3 percent of Japanese children score as low in mathematics as the average American child? When researchers asked Asian and U.S. students, teachers, and parents which is more important, “studying hard” or “innate intelligence,” Asians stressed hard work, Americans innate ability. Clearly, cultural belief is the key.
—Even within our own county, the culture of people living at an economic hardship level is distinctly different from that of “normal” life. A combination of physical hardship and cultural influences has been shown to result in poorer working memory and lessened cognitive control in adolescents.43
In an overview in the APS Observer, Alana Conner Snibbe sums up: “Cultural psychologists’ efforts have yielded a bevy of intriguing, often controversial cultural differences in psychological processes, including reasoning styles, motivation, perceptions of time, space, and color, relational styles, and emotional experience, regulation, and expression.”44
Evolutionary psychology: This relatively new field is, according to one of its leading enthusiasts, David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, nothing less than “a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology.”45 It came on the scene in the late 1980s, although it had been suggested earlier by William James and other functionalists. But while its early proponents thought natural selection had built specific behaviors into our brains, the new evolutionary psychologists believe that natural selection built into us general cognitive strategies which are expressed in various behaviors suitable to our circumstances.
An example of such an inborn strategy is the use of deception to achieve one’s goals. A number of theorists, among them Buss and Steven Pinker, argue that we lie because those of our ancestors who could do so had an advantage over their nonlying contemporaries and hence were more likely to live and to produce surviving children—who, inheriting the ability, again outproduced nonliars, until eventually the ability to lie became common to our species. But note: Lying is not a specific inherited behavior; it is a cognitive strategy that can take the form of many different behaviors, including lying, all of them deceitful but varying according to the norms of one’s culture and the particular situation.46
“Wait a moment!” you may be thinking. “The proof of evolution is the record shown by fossils—but what evidence can there be of how the mind worked in prehistoric times? Or that it was evolution that selected cognitive abilities such as the ability to deceive?”
One proof, say the evolutionary psychologists, is cultural universality: If people in all sorts of different and far-removed cultures exhibit certain similar tendencies