Discuss how social and cultural factors affect one cognitive process (22 marks)
Command term "DISCUSS" - give a considered and balanced review, including a range of arguments, factors or hypotheses. Opinions and conclusions presented clearly supported by evidence.
INTRODUCTION
Sociocultural factors: the way we think is affected by our social and cultural upbringings
Cultures may be defined using the following cultural dimensions (Hofstede 1971):
Individualism: the encouragement of emotional expression, emphasis on individuality and distinction, based on achievements
Collectivism: discourages the expression of emotions as they are seen as irrelevant or unimportant, emphasis placed on social bonds
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HOW CULTURE AFFECTS MEMORY
Culture is both a system and a process, it affects what a person remembers and why they remember it based on how important it is within their culture and what areas are emphasised
Cross-cultural research into memory is often ethnocentric
Bartlett (1932) - War of the Ghosts study: demonstrated that recall can be affected by culture and social demands
Cognitive processes like memory are universal, but how they are used is not
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STUDY: Cole and Scribner (1974)
AIM: to investigate free recall in the USA and of the Kpelle people in Liberia
PROCEDURE - Schooled and unschooled Liberian children and schooled American children were used as participants - Had to recall a selection of words grouped into 4 lists - Words were culture-specific - Recall repeated several times - Part 2: Words were meaningful objects in a story
FINDINGS - The schooled Liberian students had similar results to the schooled American children - Liberian children remembered the objects in the story well, as they grouped them according to the role they played in the story - Schooled participants used chunking to group together informatoin
CONCLUSION - Western schooling emphasises chunking / clustering, something unfamiliar in the Kpelle culture - However, Kpelle children performed well in the culturally-familiar task (story) - Free recall has no significance in the Liberian tribe - Cognitive skills are present across cultures, but they depend upon the environment the person lives in
EVALUATION - Ethnocentrism - focused on American ways of thinking - Hard to establish a cause and effect relationship because schooling is subjective - It is not entirely clear how culture influences categorisation - Education is also influenced by social interactions at home - Age bias - children - hard to generalise to everyone
Another way in which culture influences information processing and memory is described in Bartlett's Schema Theory
STUDY: Bartlett (1932) - War of the Ghosts
AIM: To prove that memory is reconstructive, and to investigate whether cultural schemas influence the participants’ ability to recall stories
PROCEDURE - Participants were White-Americans - Bartlett asked them to read a Native American folk story (The War of the Ghosts) twice - Asked to recall / reproduce using two methods (conditions): - First method - serial reproduction: one person reproduces original story, then second person reproduces first reproduction etc. (goes on for 6 / 7 reproductions) - Second method: participants asked to read the story twice, then after 15 minutes were asked to reproduce the story from memory
FINDINGS - Story appeared to get shorter after 6 / 7 reproductions - Tended to leave out or replace details that were specific to Native American culture (e.g. canoe was replaced with boat) - Tended to fill in the gaps in their memory with their own cultural schemas
CONCLUSION - People reconstruct the past by trying to remember things in terms of their own existing schemas - People try to associate unknown / vague / foreign concepts to their own understanding / experiences, people use their own schemas to fill in gaps - The more complicated the story, the more distortions there were
EVALUATION - Low ecological validity - not a natural experiment - Very few standardised rules, messy / unstructured - No control group - Cultural bias - European Americans - Emic approach - difficult to generalise
Although memory is universal, how we process, encode, learn, and remember things are not universal and are context-bound.