What Is Culture and How It Impact Our Psychological Process?

What is culture and how might it impact on psychological processes?

Is there such thing as universal psychological process or are we all different since the day we were born? Most importantly, does culture affect us as a person despite our similar biological needs? Social psychologists have been trying to investigate how different cultural norms have affected people around the world. In this essay, we will look at how culture influences different psychological processes of humans such as emotions, perception, and cognition. The essay will also look at a different factor that might affect psychological process besides culture.  

We used the word culture in many different ways in everyday language. Most people used the word culture to mean race, nationality, and ethnicity or even to reflect trends in music, food, art and others. There is no single consensual definition of culture. According to Hofstede, culture is defined as the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. On the other hand, Storti define culture as a system of beliefs and values shared by a particular group of people. Although definitions of culture vary, they tend to share the similar view that

culture is the set of cognitions and practices that characterise a specific social group and distinguish it from others (Hogg & Vaughan, 2014).

Over the years, social psychologists try to come up with different dimensions for comparing culture. Hofsteade (1980) suggested a number of dimensions such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity and individualism-collectivism that could differentiate between cultures. These dimensions enable comparison between countries. For example, Singapore is high on power distance whilst Denmark is low in power distance. This mean that generally, Singaporeans tend to accept hierarchical relationships while Denmark does not. Hofsteade also focuses on the distinction between individualistic and collectivist societies. Markus and Hitayama (1991) further discussed about the distinction by introducing concepts of independent self and interdependent self. They believe that people in individualistic (Western) cultures have an independent self whereas people in collectivist (Eastern) cultures have an interdependent self.

So how exactly did culture impact us? Social psychologists have been very interested on how culture impacts our psychological process that include how we think, remember, feel, perceive, attribute behaviour and others. Generally, psychologists believe that individuals will begin a process of learning about their culture from the first day when they were born through the process of enculturation and socialization. Enculturation takes place by “enfolding” of individuals by their culture, leading them to incorporate appropriate behaviour into their repertoires. Meanwhile, socialization takes place by more specific instruction and training leading to the acquisition of the culture-appropriate behaviour (John W. Berry, 2002). Parents are usually the first and most important socialization agents. They help instill cultural morals and values in children and from there; we are slowly shaped and molded by the different combination of geography, climate, resources and contact with other cultures. Though most of the time, people of different cultures are often different in what they do, they are usually very similar in why they do it. All humans share universal biological needs that need to be met in order to survive and that survival is the ultimate goal of evolutionary life.