Overview: What is Culture? (SL IB Psychology)

What is culture?

• Culture refers to the products of socialisation within any organised group, society or nation and involves a set of rules, norms and customs that are agreed by the members of that group  
• Culture is active rather than passive; each individual contributes to the culture in which they were born – and to the cultures they encounter throughout their life
• Culture is created by people and in turn influences the development of people i.e. it is a bi-directional process/phenomenon
• Culture is not static: it is subject to changes wrought by time, by advancing technologies, by social change, by geographical change
• Deep culture refers to the attitudes, beliefs and values that underpin daily life and habits within that culture; it may not be immediately obvious as it is inherent in cultural norms and behaviours which are familiar to those within the culture
• Examples of deep culture include belief in life after death; that cows are sacred; that everyone has the right to free speech
• Surface culture is the manifestation of deep culture i.e. observable and tangible behaviours, customs and rituals
  • Examples of surface culture include eating food with chopsticks; performing specific dances at festivals; living in houses on stilts

Culture and psychological research

• In the early days of psychology, research was carried out in Western, individualistic countries e.g the USA, the UK, Western Europe
• It was assumed that this research revealed universal truths that could be equally applied to all people: this is known as an etic approach to investigating behaviour
• An etic approach is aligned with ethnocentrism: attempting to explain all behaviour using samples which only represent one specific culture (usually individualistic)
• An imposed etic occurs when for example a Western researcher from an individualistic culture studies a different cultural group and draws conclusions about their behaviour using their own cultural standards as a measure
• One way of avoiding an etic approach is to conduct research from within a specific culture in terms that are meaningful to that culture: this is known as an emic approach to investigating behaviour
• An emic approach is aligned with cultural relativism, the idea that only those within a culture can properly explain its behaviour

Margaret Mead was one of the pioneers of emic research from the 1920s onwards.