PSY 3105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Ethnocentrism, Cultural Psychology, Enculturation

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3105
• Professor: David Collins

Document Summary

Culture is to society what memory is to the individual. A relatively stable system of norms, beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors that is shared by a group and transmitted across generations. Issues of ethnocentrism, the tendency to see the world from the standpoint of one"s own cultural values and assumptions. Cross-cultural research involves comparing how the same process or phenomenon is expressed or experienced by people from different cultural groups (both groups are given the same tasks, asked the same questions, etc. ) This points to universal vs. cultural specific processes. The commonly held norms and moral standards of a culture, the standards of right and wrong that set expectations for behavior. Rooted in symbolic inheritance (set of beliefs, ideas and understandings, both implicit and explicit, about persons, society, nature, and divinity) Norms and moral standards that arise from these beliefs, ideas, and understandings.