PSYC12H3 Study Guide - Summer 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Dependent And Independent Variables, Cultural Psychology, Collectivism
PSYC12H3
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Individualistic: cultures include a variety of practices and customs that encourage individuals
to place their own personal goals ahead of those of the collective and to consider how they are
distinct from others.
Example: include the tracking of children at school, college-age children being encouraged to
move out of their parents’ homes, workers being given meritocratic pay at the office, employees
being given individual offices or cubicles, and people choosing to put their elderly relatives in
retirement homes.
Collectivistic: include many cultural practices, institutions, and customs that encourage
individuals to place relatively more emphasis on collective goals—specifically, the goals of
one’s in-groups.
Examples: children sleeping with their parents, classes of schoolchildren being promoted
together to the next grade regardless of the performance of some individual children, marriages
being arranged by parents, companies compensating their employees on the basis of how long
they have been employed, and extended families living under one roof.
Flynn effect: a trend which on average, across all cultures for which there is adequate
longitudinal data, people in the current generation have higher IQ scores than those from earlier
generations.
- The IQ test that shows the largest increase across time is the Raven’s Matrices, which
was originally developed as a “culture-free” measure of IQ, as it doesn’t require any
specific cultural knowledge or language skills.
- Performance on the Raven’s Matrices involves basic problem-solving skills, an area
where people seem to be making the most improvement, and is the purest measure of
intelligence.
Cultures have surprising abilities to retain much of their shape and many of their
characteristics across centuries.
- Example: cultural persistence for a psychological characteristic can be seen by
comparing people from various countries around the world with the descendants of
immigrants to the United States from those same countries.
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Manners differ across cultures because people are
socialized to different sets of norms
and customs.
German sociologist Norbert Elias, in his classic work The
Civilizing, argues that Western
Europe, and likewise other modernizing cultures, was
transformed as the manners of the
aristocracy slowly trickled down to govern the behavior of
the lower classes as well.
People became “civilized” as a growing set of rules and
norms came to regulate the
behaviors of people across all classes of society.
Cultures are not monolithic and frozen entities but rather
are fluid and constantly
evolving as new ideas emerge and conditions change.
Different physical ecologies do not just affect the diets of
people; the different foraging
behaviors can also come to affect how the societies are
structured and the values that
people come to adopt.
The physical environments that we live in shape the array
of lifestyles that are possible.
Proximal causes: are those that have direct and
immediate relations with their effects.
Distal causes: are those initial differences that lead to
effects over long periods, often through
indirect relations.
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Document Summary
Individualistic: cultures include a variety of practices and customs that encourage individuals to place their own personal goals ahead of those of the collective and to consider how they are distinct from others. Collectivistic: include many cultural practices, institutions, and customs that encourage individuals to place relatively more emphasis on collective goals specifically, the goals of one"s in-groups. Flynn effect: a trend which on average, across all cultures for which there is adequate longitudinal data, people in the current generation have higher iq scores than those from earlier generations. The iq test that shows the largest increase across time is the raven"s matrices, which was originally developed as a culture-free measure of iq, as it doesn"t require any specific cultural knowledge or language skills. Performance on the raven"s matrices involves basic problem-solving skills, an area where people seem to be making the most improvement, and is the purest measure of intelligence.
