Culture and Human Social Life: CULTURE DEFINED

Culture is thus an advanced way of being social. If we think of evolution as proceeding from simple creatures

Culture is harder to define than nature. (In fact, Boyd and Richerson, 1985, listed 164 different definitions of culture that different thinkers have used!) Th e term originally referred to a system of farming (a usage one can still see in terms like agriculture). Then it came to refer to musical and artistic achievements, such as paintings and symphonies. Social scientists eventually began to use the term to refer to what a large group of people has in common. French culture, for example, refers to everything that French people share: language, values, food preferences, a style of government, a place (France), and a shared sense of connection to the artistic and historical achievements of other French people.

For present purposes, the important thing about culture is that it is a kind of social system. Just as a pack of wolves or a school of fish is a social system, so is France. But there are obvious differences. France is much more complex than a pack of wolves. It is rich in symbols, meanings, and information. There are more different kinds of relationships among the French people than among the wolves.

Culture and Human Social Life: SOCIAL ANIMAL OR CULTURAL ANIMAL?

Being social animals is not what is most special about human beings. What is special is being cultural animals. Some other animals have bits and scraps of culture.

Social psychologists like to use the phrase “the social animal” to describe human nature. Th is phrase has been used by many influential thinkers, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle right down to the modern social psychologist Elliot Aronson (2007). By calling people social animals, these thinkers are saying that people seek connections to others and prefer to live, work, and play together with other people.

People are indeed social animals, but using this label may miss the mark of what is special about human beings. Plenty of other animals are social, from ants to elephants (as Aronson and others acknowledge). Human beings are not the only and probably not even the most social animals.

Nature and Social Behavior: THE SOCIAL BRAIN

Trees don’t need brains, and solitary creatures can get by with relatively simple ones. Social animals, however, require brains with additional, flexible capabilities.

The evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1993, 1996) compared the brain sizes of many different species to see what behavioral differences went with bigger brains. (Brain size is always adjusted for body weight, because bigger animals generally have bigger brains. For example, human men have bigger brains than women, but that’s mainly because men are bigger all over.) Did big-brained species eat better foods, or more complicated foods such as fruit (which ripens and turns rotten rapidly)? Did they roam over larger territories, so that they needed a bigger brain to maintain a more complex mental map? No. What Dunbar found was that bigger brains were mainly linked to having larger and more complex social groups. Small-brained animals tend to live alone or in small, simple groups, whereas bigger-brained, presumably smarter animals have more relationships with each other and more complicated groups (such as those with dominance hierarchies and competing allies).

Th is conclusion is highly important. The human brain did not evolve because it helped us outsmart lions and tigers and bears, or build better shelters, or invent calculus. It evolved mainly in order to enable human beings to have rich, complex social lives. Th e brain is not for understanding the physical world around us, so much as it is for understanding each other. It is not so much a calculating brain or a problem-solving brain as it is a social brain.

MONEY Matters

Asking for donations is hard work, and one gets used to refusals. A clever technique developed by Cialdini and Shroeder (1976) found a way to make it harder for people to say no. In their study, some confederates simply asked for a donation to the American Cancer Society, while others added the phrase “Even a penny will help.” Adding the latter phrase nearly doubled the rate at which people said yes and gave a donation.

Of course, getting donations of only a penny would not be really of much help to the American Cancer Society! But the researchers found that the average size of the donations did not change. Thus, the even-a-penny method produced many more donations of the same approximate size, resulting in a big increase in total amount.

Why? Most reasons people give for refusing resemble “I do not have enough money to donate,” but such reasons do not work with the even-a-penny method. Everyone can aff ord to give a penny! To refuse a request when even a penny would be acceptable might make the refuser feel cheap and petty. Apparently, though, once people decide to go ahead and donate, they donate the amount they would normally give (rather than just giving a penny).

Nature and Social Behavior: SOCIAL ANIMALS

Psychologists study people. Many psychologists have studied other animals, especially rats. But psychologists have never shown much interest in studying trees. Why not?

Trees, like people and all other living creatures, need to get certain things (e.g., water, nutrients) from the world around them. What is inside them is there to enable them to get what they need. The inside parts of trees enable them to draw water from the soil, chemicals from sunlight, and so forth. Trees, however, do not move around in search of food or to escape from predators. They take what comes to them where they are. Facing few decisions and being therefore essentially indifferent to other trees, they do not have much psychology. They don’t have much in the way of thoughts, feelings, or behavior, because they don’t need these things to survive and reproduce. (That’s why psychologists don’t find them interesting.)

Contrast this with animals who also live as loners. They have to find food, possibly kill it, and eat it. They need more food and produce more waste than trees do. They need to sleep and so must find safe places to do so. Reproduction is more complicated than it is for trees, so they may need to perform a particular set of behaviors in order to reproduce. Like trees, they need to interact with their world, but doing so is more complicated for animals, so what is inside them has to be up to the task. Psychologists start to get interested in these processes.

Nature and Social Behavior: SURVIVAL

Survival is not hard to understand. It means living longer. Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe natural selection.

Animals compete against each other to survive, as in who can get the best food or who can best escape being eaten by larger animals. In a group of zebras, for example, the ones who run the slowest are most likely to be eaten by lions, so the ones born to be fast are more likely to live long enough to pass along their genes.

Survival depends in part on the circumstances in your environment. Consider the coloring of fish. Almost all fish have a relatively light colored belly and a relatively dark colored top or back. Why? Th at coloring is adapted for survival in the water. Most fish live until a bigger fish eats them, making the ability to hide from bigger fish an important trait for survival. Some big fish swim near the surface and look downward for food. Th e lower (deeper) you go in the water, the darker it gets. When a big fish looks downward, therefore, it can’t see dark-colored fish very well, so fish who are dark on the top side are harder to see (and therefore safer). Meanwhile, some big fish lurk in the depths and look upward for their food. Looking upward is looking into the light, so the best way for a fi sh to blend in is to have a light coloring on its underside. Over millions of years, the fish who were dark on top and light on the bottom survived longest because they were the hardest for the bigger fish to see, so they were less likely to be eaten and, therefore, more likely to make more baby fish with the same coloring. As a result of this selection process, most fish have this coloring today.

Nature and Social Behavior: EVOLUTION, AND DOING WHAT’S NATURAL

Over the past two decades, many social psychologists have begun looking to the theory of evolution to help explain social behavior.

The theory of evolution, proposed by the British biologist Charles Darwin in the 1800s, focuses on how change occurs in nature. Over thousands of years, a type of plant or animal may evolve into a somewhat different kind of creature. Human beings and the great apes evolved from a common ancestor.

Human beings may be different from all other animals, but we are animals nonetheless. As such, we have many of the same wants, needs, and problems that most other animals have. We need food and water on a regular basis, preferably a couple of times every day. We need sleep. We need shelter and warmth. We need air. We suffer illnesses and injuries and must find ways to recover from them. Our interactions with others are sometimes characterized by sexual desire, competition, aggressive impulses, family ties, or friendly companionship. Sometimes we say that certain people are “acting like animals,” but this is not surprising, because we are all animals. Th at phrase merely expresses the point that people can sometimes rise above their animal nature, but the animal parts are there inside all of us.

Nature and Social Behavior: NATURE DEFINED

Behavior geneticists seek to understand behavior as the result of genes and show that people are born with tendencies to feel and act in certain ways

Nature is the physical world around us, including its laws and processes. It includes the entire world that would be there even if no human beings existed. Nature includes trees and grass, bugs and elephants, gravity, the weather, hunger and thirst, birth and death, atoms and molecules, and all the laws of physics and chemistry. Nature made people too. (People who believe that the original humans were created by a divine power still recognize that the natural processes of reproduction and childbirth create today’s people.)

Those who use nature to explain human behavior invoke the sorts of processes that natural sciences have shown. For example, neuroscientists look for explanations in terms of what happens inside the brain (chemical reactions, electrical activity). Behavior geneticists seek to understand behavior as the result of genes and show that people are born with tendencies to feel and act in certain ways. Above all,however, the advocates of nature in psychology turn to evolutionary theory to understand behavior patterns. Th e next section provides an introduction to this style of thinking.

Nature and Social Behavior: EXPLAINING THE PSYCHE

One approach to understanding how people think, feel, and act is to try to understand what the human psyche is designed for. (Th e psyche is a broader term for mind, encompassing emotions, desires, perceptions, and indeed all psychological processes.) To understand something, you have to know what it was designed to do.

Imagine someone who has grown up on a deserted island and has never met another human being or seen any man-made items. Th en one day a box washes ashore containing an electric can opener. How would the person figure out what the can opener does? Having grown up on a deserted island, the person knows nothing about cans or electricity. Th is hypothetical person might take it apart, analyze it, observe its parts, and see what some of their properties are, but it would be almost impossible for this person to understand it properly.

Understanding the human psyche is somewhat like that. We want to understand and explain how it works. To do that, it is useful to know what the psyche/human mind is designed for. Hence we turn to nature and culture, because those are what made the psyche the way it is. If the psyche was designed for something in particular, then nature and culture designed it for that purpose. Accordingly, if we can learn what the purpose is, then we can understand people much better.

Being Correct: Informational Influence

Two types of situations produce informational influence: (a) ambiguous situations, so that people do not know how to behave; and (b) crisis situations, so that people don’t have time to think for themselves.

If you look at a pinpoint of light in a dark room, the light appears to move even though it does not actually move at all. This illusion of movement, caused by very slight movements of the eye, is called the autokinetic effect.

Muzafer Sherif (1935) used the autokinetic effect to study the formation of group norms. Group norms are the beliefs or behaviors that a group of people accepts as normal. Sherif asked individual participants in a dark room to estimate how far the light moved. Their individual estimates ranged from about 1 inch to about 8 inches. They repeated this process on subsequent days, but in the presence of two other participants. As participants heard the estimates provided by others, their individual answers converged and became more similar.

Being Liked: Normative Influence

Social influence is a broad category. Social psychologists distinguish between two major forms of social infl uence: normative infulence and informational infulence. Let us consider each of these in turn.

Normative infl uence involves going along with the crowd in order to be liked and accepted. As we have seen throughout this book, humans have a fundamental need to belong to social groups. Being accepted and included improves one’s chances for survival (and improves life in many other ways). However, there is a long road to acceptance within the group. To live together, people usually need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors that reduce ingroup threats and act for the common good. Th erefore, people learn to conform to their group’s rules. Th e more we see others behaving in a certain way or making particular decisions, the more we feel inclined to follow suit. Th is happens even when we are in a group of complete strangers: we will go along with the others to avoid looking like a fool.

The studies conducted by Solomon Asch illustrate the power of normative influence. Asch asked participants to judge which of three lines matched a comparison line. In some studies, the participant was asked last in a group of confederates, all of whom had been instructed to give the same wrong answer. Asch found that many participants went along with the confederates and gave the wrong answer, even though they could plainly see it was wrong, rather than deviate from the group.

Communication Skills in the Business Environment

Good communication skills are important in many aspects of life, and the business environment is certainly no exception.

No matter how talented an individual may be, if they lack the communication skills required to turn their thoughts into useful contributions then it will be to the firm's disadvantage. Skills like the ability to make effective and attention-grabbing presentations are extremely important to a variety of businesses when trying to win new clients.

For example, an employee could have spent hours producing the most brilliant presentation that has ever been created in order to win a contract from a potential client, but if they lack the communication skills to present it effectively and confidently then it is unlikely to convince those listening to the presentation that the firm could deliver on its promises and that it 'simply has' to choose your firm over the competition, and the new order will be lost. Can your business really afford to let that happen?

Confronting Anti-Social Behaviors

It's easier to behave in a socially acceptable way with others who follow the same rules, but how do you handle someone with anti-social behavior? When someone is rude, confrontational or purposefully undermining, there are some techniques that can minimize the behavior.

Anti-social people have expectations of how people respond to them. By acting outside social norms, they force others to cater to their needs and get frustrated. Anti-social people enjoy the knowledge that comes from knowing they have the power to change a conversation or disrupt a gathering. The best way to handle an anti-social person is to not allow that to happen.

When someone is making rude comments or acting rudely, many people initially react with forced laughter or simply turn away and ignore it. This encourages the individual to act up more so that everyone notices his behavior. Instead of turning your back, confront an anti-social person. Simply address the person in a straightforward and coolly polite manner. You can point out that their behavior is bothering you and others and that surely they know better. There may be a few more rude comments in return, but the wind is out of his sails and the rude person has been acknowledged, just not in the way that makes him feel powerful.

Why We Need Cultural Studies?

The citizens of multicultural countries need to have a better understanding of cultural studies than people living in countries that have a single culture

Many people are unable to describe why they behave the way they do or why their thought processes are similar to their neighbor's but not similar to a person from another country. The reasons for such differences are complicated. There are many such questions, the answers to which lie in the difference in cultures across the world. They can only be understood by studying the implication of difference in location and the evolution of behavior. The field of study that deals with such questions and variations is called cultural studies.

Such questions are relevant for a country like USA or India that has a large diversity of people. The citizens of such countries need to have a better understanding of cultural studies than people living in countries that have a single culture. One can invest time and money to understand this subject. This will promote a higher level of cooperation and understanding. Today, many institutions teach the basic tenets of the evolution of culture and tradition to their students, as a part of the country's history. Consequently, people who are interested in studying history find themselves delving deeper into the subject.

Group Norms in Organizations

Group norms are important determinants of whether a group will be productive. Norms usually develop slowly as groups learn those behaviors that will facilitate their activities.

Group norms are the informal rules that groups adopt to regulate members' behavior. Norms are characterized by their evaluative nature; that is, they refer to what should be done. Norms represent value judgments about appropriate behavior in social situations. Although they are infrequently written down or even discussed, norms have powerful influence on group behavior.

If each individual in a group decided how to behave in each interaction, no one would be able to predict the behavior of any group member; chaos would reign. Group norms guide behavior and reduce ambiguity in groups.

Groups do not establish norms about every conceivable situation but only with respect to things that are significant to the group. Group norms might apply to every member of the group or to only some members. Norms that apply to particular group members usually specify the role of those individuals. Norms vary in the degree to which they are accepted by all members of the group: some are accepted by almost everyone, others by some members and not others.

Ways to Prevent Aggressive Children

Aggression in young children is a common problem and most parents don't understand how to deal with it.

Aggressive children is not an issue that can not be resolved. Though there are ways to take constructive action upon the situation, but the results are not quickly obvious, as it involves young children who lack maturity and self-control skills.

Parenting an aggressive children can be challenging, it is difficult to teach your child new and appropriate ways to interact with other children and with adults.

Analysing possible reasons behind aggressive children

We can analyze aggressive children by common behavior of children. The main reason is children are impulsive, easily irritable, and immature and face difficulty in accepting criticism. Aggressive children can also be because of any personal injury to him or his loved one. This injury can either be psychological or physical.

The Psychology of Friendship

On the three levels of friendship and understanding social personality patterns according to friendship styles.

With social networking the very crux of modern virtual living, it is simply not possible to avoid a psychology of friendship. But friendship may not be as simple as it seems as it has got several layers and complexities and friendship can be of many types. Yet friendship like love depends on the single factor of attraction and in this case, it is more of a mental and emotional rather than physical attraction. So when romantic love begins with physical attraction, friendship is more mental, emotional or psychological.

Among maybe thousands of students we meet in school or a few hundred we meet at the workplace, we finally become close and attain a level of friendship with very few or limited people. So like love, friendship also goes through our internal filter and as we choose our lovers unconsciously, even our friends are chosen unconsciously as we intuitively understand who could be our true friends.

Social Psychology, how it helps understanding relations?

Psychologists who study social psychology are into understanding behavioral aspects such as aggression, altruism, social influence, cognitive dissonance and attitudes, which are all related to interpersonal behaviors rather than just an individual state of mind.

Social psychology is a form of psychology that studies the relationship between people in a group. They are responsible for studying human behavior at the social level and also check out how people interact with one another in a given environment. Though there is a similarity between sociological researchers and psychological researchers, there is a difference in the way both function, especially in arenas such as approach used, methodology and career goals.

Those who are interested in taking up a career in social psychology must have done a bachelors degree in the subject and having a master degree would be an ideal choice. Having a Doctorate Degree can help them get work faster. Doing a doctorate in psychology is an extensive task, as it involves undertaking a complete one-year research project, writing out a dissertation, passing oral exams, and handling experimental research work.

How To Deal With The Emotional Ramifications Of Acne

Few people enjoy the thought of having several huge red bumps on their face. But there's a couple of secrets, or different ways to think about acne that can help you face the world despite how bad your particular condition is.

Acne is a dreaded skin condition that affects almost every person alive. There are billions of dollars spent on acne medication, either over the counter medication, or cures prescribed by doctors. All this for a condition that in reality, is purely cosmetic. Sure, there are dangers from letting acne go untreated for too long, but for most of us, we just want to get those ugly red bumps off our face. In this article, I'd like to address the impact acne can have on your self-esteem, and your self-confidence.

Acne really isn't that bad of a condition, from a purely medical standpoint. Of course, it is possible to develop some extremely serious condition that starts with acne, but it's not all the likely. Most people seek out acne treatment from a purely cosmetic standpoint.

Not that those are bad reasons. Few people enjoy the thought of having several huge red bumps on their face. But there's a couple of secrets, or different ways to think `bout acne that can help you face the world despite how bad your particular condition is. Even the best cures can take a couple weeks, and you still have to leave your room every once in a while.

Will Power is Over Rated

Does it seem like your will power is non-existent? Are you having difficulty eliminating bad habits, such as smoking or over eating?

If you are discouraged with your apparent lack of will power, this may be the most important information you could possibly get your hands on. Previously, the medical community believed the human brain consisted of the conscious and subconscious (or non-conscious). More recently, scientific human brain research has proven this to be inaccurate.

Tests done on human subjects actually prove we think in six areas of our brains simultaneously. While asleep our mind still functions in five of these areas. This means our conscious thinking is actually only 1/6th of our brain power and the non-conscious portion is actually 5/6th.

Branches Of Psychology

Psychology as a whole is quite a broad subject so to study it properly it has been divided in to various branches

Psychology as a whole is quite a broad subject so to study it properly it has been divided in to various branches that tell about the different aspects of the human behavior, thoughts and experience. In this article some of the branches are mentioned and explained briefly below.

Firstly it is Experimental Psychology, which is a methodological approach rather than a subject and the research is conducted on using the experimental methods. This branch focuses on the process of sensing, thinking, perceiving and learning in a human. Secondly, it’s Biological Psychology which deals at the level of the nerves, neurotransmitter, and other body biological process that underlie normal and abnormal behavior in a human being. Thirdly, there is Developmental Psychology, which is the study of systematic psychological changes that takes place through the life span of a human; that is from its infancy to its death.

Fourthly, it is Social psychology which is basically the study of the relationship between an individual and groups. The experts in this field are called sociologist and psychologist and they study both the individuals and the groups to complete their research. Fifthly, its industrial/Organizational psychology. It is a relatively new branch of psychology and it is the study of the relationship between a man and the world of work.

What Is Social Psychology?

Social psychology is concerned with explaining how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by others.

Social psychology also deals with how people interact with others in social settings. Just from everyday exposure, you may remember terms like conformity, social status, motivation, and prejudice. These are all key concepts associated with social psychology. There are also some basic aspects of social behavior that play a large role in how we view ourselves as individuals.

Examples of research questions that appeal to social psychologists: How do teacher ratings websites affect perceptions of instructor effectiveness? How13740183 does gender affect perceptions of effective political leadership? Do people carry out instructions from authority figures even if it violates moral principles?