PSYC14H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Clifford Geertz, 18 Months, Kalahari Desert
PSYC14
January 26, 2018
Chapter 5: Development and Socialization
By: Ivy Alam
Universal Brains Develop into Culturally Variable Minds
• Humans could be distinguished from their ancestors (pronto-chimpanzees) through the key adaptation of the
ability to learn and collect cultural information
- Enabled us to learn the necessary tools and skills needed to become successful in many kinds of
environments eg. Amazonian Jungle, Kalahari Desert, corporate world of Wall Street
• Cultural knowledge is not inherited in our heads, compared to other species (Salmon- going back to the stream
they were born from, cats- hunting positions; all based on instinct and hard-wired knowledge)
- Humans have certain biological abilities that allow us to learn skills
- We can adjust and grasp meanings from any environment that is presented to us
• We come into this world cultureless, but we are prepared to adjust to and seize meaning from any environment
with which we are presented
• Clifford Geertz, “we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but in the end, having
lived only one”
- Interprets as; the universal biological foundation is sculpted by our experiences, so that we can succeed in
broad range of cultural environments
• Everyone has been socialized into a certain cultural environment which influences our perception and
understanding of ourselves and our world
Sensitive Periods for Cultural Socialization
• Sensitive Period: refers to period of time in an organism’s development that allows for the relatively easy
acquisition of a set of skills. If an organism misses that chance to acquire those skills, it would have a difficult
time doing so later, after the sensitive period has expired.
• trade-off takes between an organism’s ability to learn new behaviours that suit its new environment and its
abilities to specialize behaviours that are effective in particular environments
Sensitive Periods for Language Acquisition
• Language ability is a defining feature of humans, even though basic language skills are seen in some species, in
terms of humans, we have incredible dependency on the ability, and we developed a complex language system
that isn’t seen anywhere else
• People can discriminate different sounds
- Humans can produce and recognize using 150 phonemes (units of sounds), but no single language uses more
than 70 of them. Thus, various language around the world use different combinations of phenomes that
distinguish languages
- People can’t discriminate between some of the phonemes that aren’t their own language
E.g. native Japanese-speaking adults who never learned English as a child, the words
“rubber” and “lover” sound the same. However, to English speakers Japanese use of phonemes like- “la” and
“ra”, “ba” and “va” are obviously different
- Young infants can distinguish among all the phonemes that humans produce
- Once we learn a language, as a function we perceive sounds categorically, once we are exposed to a
language we start to categorize sounds that are used by that language
- Within the 1st year, infants begin to lose the ability to distinguish between closely related sounds that are
not in their own language
- Research suggests humans are biologically ready to understand human speech as soon we come into this
world
- Before puberty, our brains are plastic for organizing themselves in response to language input however,
later on our brains aren’t as flexible
- Therefore, humans are able to better grasp and master language early in life (includes first and second
languages). It’s more difficult to learn a language after sensitive period has expired, due to different accents
and pronunciations
- Evidence shows that early in life, language center of the brain is quite flexible at attuning itself to various
kinds of linguistic input, afterwards (sensitive period begins to close), these regions of the brain aren’t
capable to being restructured to accommodate new language
Sensitive Periods for Acquiring Culture
• Each language has it’s own grammar, accent, syntax, morphology, and vocabulary
• Cultures are less tangible to study compared to languages
• Study conducted of Chinese (Hong Kong) immigrants of Vancouver, Canada (refer to graph below);
- (left panel) immigrants that had arrived before the age of 15 strongly identified with Canadian culture the
longer they lived there
- (middle panel) individuals that had moved to the country between ages 16-30, didn’t identify more with
Canada the longer they were in Canada
- (right panel) individuals that had arrived after the age of 31 identified with Canada slightly less the longer
they were in Canada
- The findings are consistent to concept of the sensitive window for culture acquisition starts to close at the
age of 15
- *results may be peculiar to the experiences of these Chinese immigrants
- We suspect that the more opportunities there are for immigrants to continue to live and communicate as they
had in their heritage cultures, the more difficult it becomes to fully acquire their host culture’s ways if they first
arrive at an older age.
Cultural Differences in Psychological Processes Emerge with Age
• Research shows that East Asians and North Americans differ in how they expect the future to unfold;
- NAs more likely to expect trends will continue in same direction as they had in the past vs. East Asians who
expect change will be nonlinear, decreasing trend will be followed with an increasing trend
Document Summary
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