CULTURE Culture

ABSTRACT

To give a single, uncontroversial definition of the concept culture is a difficult task, for any definition of culture is itself an expression of a theoretical stance. With this caveat, the following definition summarizes a conception of culture widely used in contemporary psychology. Broadly, culture is a collection of information (or meanings) that is (a) non-genetically transmitted between individuals, (b) more or less shared within a population of individuals, and (c) maintained across some generations over a period of time. As such, culture plays an important role in the formation of individual and collective self-concepts or identities and has implications for human psychology. The below paper discusses the concept of culture in a holistic concept.

Culture

Introduction

Culture, as a concept, is one of the most complex ideas in academic use today. It is defined and applied in various and often incompatible ways and is the site of significant disagreement between academic disciplines regarding the fundamental character of human, social life and the manner in which it is to be studied. For anthropologists, culture tends to refer to symbolic systems of beliefs, values, and shared understandings that render the world meaningful and intelligible for a particular group of people. While these systems-which provide the basis for such elementary concepts as food and kinship and even, influence how individuals experience time, space, and other aspects of reality-often appear to their adherents as natural and objective, they in fact, represent variable, socially agreed-upon models. In turn, humans must themselves construct these models in order to find order and meaning in a world lacking an inherent sense of either (Williams, 1983).

Chiu, C.-Y., & Hong, Y.-Y. (2007). Cultural processes: Basic principles. In A. W. Kruglanski, ed. & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 785-804). New York: Guilford Press.

In the 1980s and 1990s, culture and psychology emerged as a major research area. There was a fertile social, economic, and political ground that called out for social, psychological research on cultural differences. With the globalizing economy, the unprecedented exchange of people and resources across national borders created a mutual need for knowledge about other cultures.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Geert Hofstede, an organizational psychologist working for a multinational corporation, provided a broad framework of cross-cultural comparison in his 1980 book, Culture's Consequences, based on his surveys about work values of IBM employees from more than 40 countries around the world. He identified four cultural dimensions—power distance, individualism and collectivism, masculinity and femininity, and uncertainty avoidance—on which each cultural group may be located. Power distance indicated the extent to which people tolerated power differences in society; individualism and collectivism capture relative emphasis placed on individual or group; masculinity (as opposed to femininity) had to do with the extent to which gender-based roles were clearly differentiated; and uncertainty avoidance indexed the degree to which uncertainty was met with anxiety and clear rules of conduct were preferred. Of these dimensions, individualism and collectivism became the focal point of empirical research in ...