Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 51

The notion that social behavior is affected by culture may strike you as exceedingly obvious. Yet, for much of the 20th century, as mentioned earlier, psychologists of all stripes believed that human psychology was essentially the same everywhere on the planet. It is now widely recognized that humans are, in fact, a cultural species, and that human behavior cannot be adequately understood without consideration of its sociocultural context (Baumeister, 2005; Heine, 2010a; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1999). Earlier we touched on how self-concepts can differ between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. There are countless other ways that culture can affect social behavior. For instance, Robert Levine and his colleagues studied perceptions of time in Brazil and the United States (Levine, 2015; Levine, West, & Reis, 1980). They found that Brazilians tend to view time as continuous and unlimited, whereas Americans see it as separable into discrete units and treat it as if it were quickly running out! One of the consequences of these different time perspectives is that, in Brazil, being “on time” for appointments and completing tasks “on time” are not nearly as important as they are in the United States. What elements of your culture have had major impacts on how you see yourself and the world?

These four fundamental principles—that social behavior is purposive, caused by both dispositional and situational factors, affected by construals, and cultural—provide the grounding from which we launch our social psychological project. They are assumptions upon which we can build our explanatory models, theories, and concepts, and help guide our investigation of social psychological phenomena. These principles will serve as unifying themes in the chapters that follow as we look for the causes of social behavior.