PSY100H1 Lecture Notes - Social Loafing, Social Anxiety Disorder, Physical Attractiveness

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100H1
• Professor: Ashley Waggoner Denton

Document Summary

Culture consists of information transmitted through learning in broader sense, culture is any kind of info acquired by individuals through imitative or social learning. Some aspects of culture are shared by other species and some are unique to humans. Culture must have survival and reproductive value the larger the average group size, the large the cerebral cortex ratio. Human brains evolved to be as big as they are because the cognitive capacities of a large brain were highly adaptive for social living. Humans do not differ all that much from other primates in terms of their general problem solving intelligence, rather the human brain appears to have evolved to be esp. adept at learning info from others. That is, after watching a model perform a behaviour, humans can reproduce that behaviour accurately and then improvise and add to that behaviour; cultural info accumulates and evolves.