Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 41

This second level of analysis focuses on group-level explanations for social behavior and compliments insights gleaned from the evolutionary approach. Here we focus on broad influences such as culture, social class, race, and religion. For example, Leon Mann (1981) adopted this approach when he investigated how crowd size impacts the likelihood that onlookers encourage—or bait—a would-be suicide jumper into actually leaping from a bridge or building. Interestingly, he found that baiting was more prevalent in larger groups! We discuss additional ways in which group size affects social behavior in the chapters on social influence, persuasion, and group processes (Chapters 6, 7, and 12, respectively).

For much of the 20th century, psychologists mostly studied wealthy white North American male college students and assumed that the findings were universal and therefore as valid in Cairo or Rio de Janeiro as in Boston (Heine, 2010a). In other words, culture’s effects on social behavior were not widely recognized by psychologists. However, in recent years there has been an increasing recognition of the profound effects of culture on our social behavior, including phenomena as varied as self-concept, self-esteem, perceptions of time, attitudes toward marriage, and beliefs about mental illness (Gelfand, Chiu, & Hong, 2011; Valsiner, 2012; Vauclair et al., 2015). Culture can be defined as a system of enduring meanings, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and practices shared by a large group of people. It is important to note that, although nations may be dominated by a particular culture, cultures are not necessarily nations. For instance, scholars have described cross-cultural differences that extend across nations, such as those between Western and Eastern cultures (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010; Triandis, 1993), as well as within-culture differences, like those distinguishing the American South from the North (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996).

The most widely studied cross-cultural variable is individualism-collectivism (IC), which was initially conceptualized as broadly distinguishing the Western cultures of North America and parts of Europe from Eastern ones in South and East Asia, including China and Japan (Hofstede, 1986; Triandis, 1993; van Hoorn, 2015). However, more recently researchers have discovered that the IC dimension is more complex, varying within cultures and extending to cultures on other continents, including South America. Succinctly put, individualists are self-focused: They define themselves as containing stable, internal traits not tied to particular groups, value individual choice, and place their personal preferences and goals above those of the group.

In contrast, collectivists tend to be other-focused: Their self-concept is intimately tied to and defined by their group memberships, individual choice is not highly valued, and personal preferences and goals are subordinated to those of the group (Triandis, 1993). It is important to note that, although we often talk about individualist and collectivistic cultures as if they were completely different, there is in fact considerable overlap: People in one type of culture can and do exhibit characteristics common in people from the other type (Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett, Butner, & Gornik-Durose, 1999; Hofstede, de Hilal, Malvezzi, Tanure, & Vinken, 2010; Triandis & Gelfand, 2012; Triandis & Singelis, 1998). We will return again and again to culture’s prominent role in explaining elements of social behavior throughout this text.

Culture: System of enduring meanings, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and practices shared by a large group of people