Human Growth and Development / Unit 11 HGD 1548 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Culture and Cognition
The idea
Culture shapes how adults think. Collectivistic cultures tend to favour holistic thinking, attending to relationships and context, while individualistic cultures tend toward analytic thinking, focusing on objects and their attributes. The contrast shows most sharply in attribution, how people explain behaviour. In one study, European American adults explained a person's failure to help mostly by personality, a dispositional attribution, while Hindu Indian adults explained it mostly by the situation, a situational attribution. The same contrast appears elsewhere: Eastern definitions of creativity stress appropriateness to the setting, Western definitions stress novelty. Japanese and US students used exchange norms in deciding whether to help a friend, weighing what had been given and received, while Indian students used communal norms, helping because the relationship called for it. Familism in Latino culture, a strong orientation to family, predicts prosocial tendencies.
In practice
A coworker who misses a deadline: one colleague concluding "she's disorganized," another "her child must have been sick," the same event explained two ways.
Where people slip
The misconception is that these are fixed traits of whole nations. They are tendencies measured on average, with wide overlap between cultures and much variation within them, and globalization is blurring some differences, as the shift toward independence among Japanese young adults shows. The attribution contrast connects to unit eight's hostile attribution bias and to unit twelve's treatment of attributional style: all concern how people explain why things happen. Researchers also disagree about how cultures handle ambiguity, so the course does not generalize on that point. For the exam, know dispositional versus situational attributions and holistic versus analytic thinking, and know that cultural differences are average tendencies, not rules. Culture shapes cognition without determining it.
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