Role of Culture in Sociocultural approach of Psychology

To study the role of cultural dimensions in sociocultural approach, etic research is used. It's the comparison between different cultures in order to observe its effect on behaviour as universal. With such a high generalizability, there might be limitations that researchers didn’t immerse into the culture but these cultural differences could be reduced by limiting the researcher biases.

Moreover, cultural dimension is the effect of cultural values on one’s behaviour. Many researches have been carried out in order to determine the role of culture on behaviour through etic approach.

To start with, Levine et al (1995) carried out a study aiming to investigate the role of cultural dimensions, behaviour plays on mate selection.

It was a survey which involves university students from 11 different cultures asking them a question that “if a person had all the qualities you look for your partner, would you be likely to marry them if you don't love them?’’; in reply they have to answer straight away in yes, no or neutral.

Thus, the dependent variable is response of the students,whereas, the independent variable of the study is the difference between individualist and collectivist countries.

The results were quoted as,  those students who belong to collectivist cultures answered yes whereas, participants from individualist culture said ‘no’ to it.

Furthermore, based on these results Triandis el al (2001) elaborated that people from collectivist cultures have to consider the benefit for larger community, and in this case a person being healthy enough can help the community in difficult situations, hence less individual behaviour is ignored or sacrificed in this case.

On the other hand, people belonging to individualist cultures make decisions more on the basis of individual factors e.g one’s happiness. 

Hence, the above further study makes the original study more reliable, however there were some few limitations of the study. Firstly, an imagery scenario is used in forming a question,  hence one cannot determine the extent to which it's applied to real life situations.

Then, the use of the survey is less accurate as it contains more of participants' biases or demand characteristics that are socially desirable. Also, college students form specific different cultures and small cities were used which limits the generalizability  of the study as small cities have generally different cultures from the country they belong to, hence its not valid for the whole population.

Additionally, to elaborate more on how cultural values are evident in behaviour, another study is carried out by Cohen et al. (1996) aiming to see the effect on cultural dimensions from both biological perspectives on behaviour.

The study involved white northern and southern american males, who were told that they have to make a judgement in the experiment. They had to perform a pre and post test of  their saliva in the experiment, to measure the level of testosterone (for aggression); which is the dependent variable.

Participants were asked to fill a questionnaire and while walking through the corridor when submitting it to the experimenter they had to bump into one of the participants and call them ‘asshole’.

Thus, the difference between southern and american values was independent variable. Furthermore, in their findings, there was a 12% increase in level of testosterone for southerners; who were more violent  and a 4% increase in case of northern Americans.

Thus, on this basis, researchers concluded that the increase in level of aggression was more because of the difference between cultural values. By relating culture of honours to these, they stated that Americans belonging from the south side had been suffering at the hands of the law system, hence they found it more defensive to stand up by themselves.

Whereas, northern Americans, depending upon the justice provided by the law system, do not find it necessary to defend themselves. 

Now, to analyze the above research, it lacks external validity as the study more focus on american’s male population, ignoring the other genders.

Also, it cannot be generalized to the whole northern and southern community because cultural values vary from  participant to participant, depending on the area or the society they live in. Also, some ethical concerns i.e. mental harm performed during the experiment by making the participants use abusive language.

Similarly, participants were debriefed that in the experiment they will be assessed on their judgments, whereas the aim stated by researchers focuses on the ‘verbal abusive act’ they were asked to perform. Hence, the above case study agrees to the fact that how cultural values varied from southern american to northern american when  relating to their past experiences, but, it inculcates in participants to stereotype people belonging to southern american culture as ‘violent.’

Further, in order to explain the extent of the role of cultural dimensions on behaviour, Kulkofsky et al (2011) carried out a study , aiming to determine emotions in link with flash bulb memories; determining this difference in individualist and collectivist cultures.

The study involves 274 adults as “middle class” from five different countries - China , Turkey, UK, Germany and USA. The participants had to recall any public event in five minutes and then were asked to fill questionnaires from (brown and kulik, 1977) about where, how,when and with whom you are with , it had occurred.

Participants were also asked some personal opinions about how surprising it was. As the survey involves participants from different countries, researchers used bilingual forms so that each country member has an ease to fill it in their own language, which reduces the confounding variable.

For the result, researchers stated that participants belonging to collectivist cultures -china were more likely to have less  personal importance and emotional concerns towards the flash bulb memory they recall as compared to participants from individualist culture.

The reason being that as individual’s own experiences are de- emphasized in collectivist cultures, eventually, the rehearsal of the triggered event would be less rehearsed and vice versa.

To evaluate the above research, the ecological fallacy can be questioned as the flash bulb memories of people from the whole country cannot be generalized as everyone had different emotions concerning it. Also, the participants' personal memories are not reliable whether they are true or not.

One ethical concern i.e. participants might feel undue stress and harm when memorising the tragic events which triggers their emotions. Hence, the research can vadilites to the fact that emotions related to certain events varied from different cultures one belongs with.

So, from the above discussion of different researches, one can observe the extensive role of different cultural dimensions on behaviour by the research method stated as “etic approach.”