Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Latin America defies cultural theories based on East-West contrasts (LatAm community)

#1
C C Offline
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lati...omparisons

EXCERPTS: . . . . Due to differences in methodology and interpretation, the teams’ findings about how people living in the collectivist nations of Latin America think are also contradictory. And that raises a larger question: Will overarching cultural theories based on East-West divisions hold up over time, or are new theories needed?

[...] “If you make most of the cultures of the world … invisible,” says Vivian Vignoles, a cultural psychologist at the University of Sussex in England, “you will get all sorts of things wrong.” Such misconceptions can jeopardize political alliances, business relationships, public health initiatives and general theories for how people find happiness and meaning...

[...] Until four decades ago, most psychologists believed that culture had little bearing on the mind. That changed in 1980. Surveys of IBM employees taken across some 70 countries showed that attitudes toward work largely depended on workers’ home country, IBM organizational psychologist Geert Hofstede’s wrote in Culture’s Consequences.

Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, a cultural psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, subsequently fleshed out one Hofstede’s four cultural principles: Individualism versus collectivism. Culture does influence thinking, the duo claimed in a now widely cited paper in the 1991 Psychological Review. By comparing people in mostly the East and West, they surmised that living in individualist countries (i.e. Western ones) led people to think independently while living in collectivist countries (the East) led people to think interdependently.

That paper was pioneering at the time, Vignoles says. Before that, with psychological research based almost exclusively in the West, the Western mind had become the default mind. Now, “instead of being only one kind of person in the world, there [were] two kinds of persons in the world.”

How individualism/collectivism shape the mind now undergirds the field of cross-cultural psychology. But researchers continue to treat the East and West, chiefly Japan and the United States, as prototypes, Vignoles and colleagues say. To expand beyond that narrow lens, the team surveyed 7,279 participants in 33 nations and 55 cultures...

[...] That analysis allowed the researchers to identify seven dimensions of independence/interdependence, including self-reliance versus dependence on others and emphasis on self-expression versus harmony. Strikingly, Latin Americans were as, or more, independent as Westerners in six out of the seven dimensions, the team reported in 2016 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The researchers’ subsequent analysis of four studies comprising 17,255 participants across 53 nations largely reaffirmed that surprising finding. For instance, Latin Americans are more expressive than even Westerners, Vignoles, de Almeida and colleagues report in February in Perspectives in Psychological Science. But that finding violates the common view that people living in collectivist societies suppress their emotions to foster harmony, while people in individualistic countries emote as a form of self-expression.

[...] Latin American nations are collectivist, as defined by Hofstede and others, but the people think and behave independently, the team concludes.

Kitayama’s team has a different take: Latin Americans are interdependent, just in a wholly different way than East Asians. Rather than suppressing emotions, Latin Americans tend to express positive, socially engaging emotions to communicate with others, says cultural psychologist Cristina Salvador of Duke University. That fosters interdependence, unlike the way Westerners express emotions to show their personal feelings. Westerners’ feelings can be negative or positive and often have little to do with their social surroundings — a sign of independence... (MORE - missing details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article "Every store is closed in Oakland" (West Coast shoplifting community) C C 1 103 Aug 30, 2023 11:03 AM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  Seceding from Oregon: just how much bigger could Idaho get? (West Coast community) C C 13 363 Nov 10, 2021 04:18 AM
Last Post: Syne
  Indigenous communities are the best guardians of Latin America’s forests C C 1 112 Oct 1, 2021 03:51 PM
Last Post: C C
  Vaccine nationalism: Here come the old "Marxist formula/template" conspiracy theories C C 0 116 Apr 21, 2021 05:35 AM
Last Post: C C
  Andrew Yang’s tech policy: Only as weird as America’s (US community) C C 0 225 Jul 29, 2019 02:48 AM
Last Post: C C
  Australia defies climate warning to back coal (down under community) C C 10 1,468 Oct 12, 2018 01:15 AM
Last Post: confused2
  Religio-cultural child sex abuse & exploitation dramas in UK & US communities C C 6 668 Aug 19, 2018 01:11 AM
Last Post: Secular Sanity
  Oneness: East Asian Conceptions of How We are All Connected (monistic community) C C 0 309 May 9, 2018 09:17 PM
Last Post: C C
  Studying ISIS & martyrdom communities & their cultural neighbors, first hand C C 0 429 Jun 3, 2016 06:41 PM
Last Post: C C
  Trends: Punish Justin Timberlake for ‘Cultural Theft of Black Community’? C C 1 708 May 27, 2016 04:04 AM
Last Post: Magical Realist



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)