Cultural psychology
Chapter 5
Development and socialization

Universal brains develop into culturally variable minds

Cultural knowledge skills are not in our heads form the beginning. We must learn these skills and we have certain biological potentials that enable us to learn them well.

Our universal foundation is shaped by our experiences, such that we are able to thrive in an extremely broad array of cultural environments. All human have been socialized into some kind of cultural environment that influences how they perceive and understand themselves and their worlds.

Sensitive periods for cultural socialization

 A sensitive period is a period of time in an organism’s development that allows for the relatively easy acquisition of a set of skills.

There is a trade-off between an organism’s ability to learn new behaviours that suit its new environment and its abilities to specialize in behaviours that are effective in particular environments.

Sensitive periods for language acquisition

One source of evidence for a sensitive period of language acquisition is with respect to people’s abilities to discriminate among different sounds. People are not able to discriminate easily between some phonemes that are not in their own language. Young infants an discriminate among all the phonemes that humans are able to produce. When we learn a language, it is functional to perceive sounds categorically. As we are exposed to a language, we begin to categorize sounds in ways that are used by that language, and this begins in very early life. Within the first year, infants begin to lose the ability to distinguish between closely related sounds that are not in their own language.  

We are biologically prepared to attend to human speech as soon as we come into this world. This preference for speech predisposes us to start picking up languages. Early in life (before puberty), our brains are especially pliable for organizing themselves in response to language input. Later on, our brains are not as flexible.

Early In life the language centre of the brain is quite flexible at attuning itself to various kinds of linguistic input. After the sensitive period starts to close, those regions of the brain are no longer capable of being restructured to accommodate the new language.

We are socialized to understand different languages.

Sensitive periods for acquiring culture

Learning a language is a necessary aspect of being socialized into a particular culture. Language and culture are both meaning systems that we acquire through our social interactions, and they depend greatly on each other. Some would say language the communicating function of culture.

There is support for the existence of a sensitive window for culture acquisition that begins to close around age 15.

Psychological processes become more pronounced with age.

How do early childhood experiences differ across cultures?

Acquiring culture is a developmental process, and people are socialized into their respective cultural worlds by participating in specific cultural practices and institutions. The more one has engaged in a given cultural practice, the more one’s ways of thinking become habitualized to respond to that practice.

Infants’ personal space

There are many different ways in which infants are raised around the world. The first experiences of infants vary dramatically around the world. These differences are in: physical space, face-to-face contact, exercise and where the baby is put.

Parenting decisions are moralized by others, they are seen as either good or bad. Parenting decisions, and the ways that others in the culture respond to them, reflect the underlying values of a culture.

The different sleeping arrangements preferred between cultures tell us much about the underlying values of the cultures. These arangements are due to: 1) Incest avoidance, postpubescent members of the family of the opposite sex should not sleep in rooms together.  2) Protection of the vulnerable, young children who are needy and vulnerable should not be left alone at night 3) Female chastity anxiety, unmarried postpubescent women should always be chaperoned to protect them from engaging in any sexual activity that would be viewed as shameful 4) Respect for hierarchie, postpubescent boys are conferred social status by allowing them not to sleep with parents our young children 5) Sacred could, married couples should be given their own space for emotional intimacy and sexual privacy 6) Autonomy ideas, young children who are needy and vulnerable should learn to be self-reliant and take care of themselves

Children from different cultures would thus have very different early experiences. The social worlds of young children differ dramatically around the globe, and children are thus learning very different ideas about how to perceive themselves and their relations with others.

Parenting styles

Authoritarian parenting involves high demands on children, with strict rules and little open dialogue between parent and child. It typically involves low levels of warmth or responsiveness by the parents to the child’s protests.

Authoritative parenting is a child-centred approach in which parents hold high expectations of the maturity of their children, try to understand their children’s feelings and teach them how to regulate those feelings, and encourage children to be independent while maintaining limits and controls on their behaviours. This approach is associated with parental warmth, responsiveness, and democratic reasoning.

Permissive parenting is characterized by parents being very involved with their children, with much expressed parental warmth and responsiveness, but placing few limits and controls on the children’s behaviours.

The results of research on these styles with Western populations have been fairly consistent.  Authoritative parenting leads to the most desirable outcomes in terms of perceived parental warmth, acceptance, better school achievement, autonomy, and self-reliance.

Some have argued that this typology is bound up in Western cultural understandings of development and does not adequately capture parenting styles elsewhere. 1)  Some cultures have different parenting styles depending on the stage of development of the child 2) The ways that warmth and responsiveness are communicated by parents vary considerably across cultures 3) The authoritarian category has been argued to exclude the role of training.

The underlying cultural foundation of different parenting styles can be seen in that some parenting styles appear to produce different outcomes across cultures. But, overly strict and controlling parenting appears to be associate with less happy children.

By an early age, children in different cultures are socialized to differentially attend to either individualistic or collectivistic aspects of themselves.

Noun biases

Young children, typically around the age of 18 months, enter a period of accelerated world learning when their vocabularies being to increase dramatically. This increase in vocabulary is not distributed equally across all different forms of words. The first words that young children tend to learn are nouns. This preponderance of nouns relative to verbs and other relational words in young children’s vocabularies is the noun bias.

Researchers argue that the noun bias indicates that nouns are more salient, refer to more concrete concepts, and are easier to isolate from the environment than other words.

This noun bias is not universal. This might be due to the nature of a language that makes nouns more salient Some languages allow for nouns to drop if the context is clear. This can also be due to the possibility that young children learn to communicate about objects differently across cultures.

Westerners tend to perceive the world in a more analytic fashion, seeing objects as discrete and separate. East Asians are more likely to perceive the world in holistic terms, stressing the relations between objects.

Difficult developmental transitions

There can be a number of key periods where children go through growing pains as they begin to transition to a new level of maturity.

The terrible twos

The idea that children pass through a difficult transition during their early toddler years is viewed as a hallmark of development, at least by Westerners. Around the age of 2 there is an unmistakable increase in non-compliant and oppositional behaviour. Many Western researchers describe it as an important developmental milestone when the young toddler begins to establish his or her individuality, and this is seen as the foundation for mature relationships.

Two-year-olds in many other cultures are not as obstinate and difficult as in the US. Toddlers raised in American environments seem to be embracing aspects of autonomy and individualism. In contrast, children raised with cultural goals of interdependence signs of non-compliance often appear to be replaced by efforts to fit in and belong.

Adolescent rebelling

In the West, adolescence is typically described as a chaotic period of ‘storm and stress’ when teens act out against authority figures, and so forth. It is also viewed as a violent phase of life.

The traditional view of the turmoil of adolescence was that it arose from the hormonal changes associated with puberty. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the universality of adolescent rebellion.

Adolescence itself is not a cultural invention and seems to be an existential universal. There are some pronounced cultural differences in the experiences of adolescents. The majority of cultures did not expect adolescents to behave especially disobediently.

Some features of modern Western societies seem to be associated with increased adolescent distress. This includes the sheer range of opportunities that confront children as societies industrialize and become more urbanized.

Socialisation through education

We depend on cultural information to excel, and as our cultural words become more complex, the average amount of education that people receive increases accordingly.

We also learn kinds of knowledge through formal schooling that is not explicitly taught. Schooling leads people to think in ways that are different from the thought processes of people who do not experience formal schooling. Education afford the skills underlying taxonomic categorization. It also seems to facilitate abstract logical reasoning. Another way that we can see the influence of education on thinking is by considering how much of our intellectual capability is sustained by knowledge that is built into the ways that problems are framed.

A few years of schooling led to some rather dramatic effects on the cognitive abilities of children.