Cultural Diversity
Assignment 1
What cross-cultural limitations to you see in Erikson’s, Piaget’s, and Kohlberg’s theories?
According to Erikson’s theories, the world is viewed as a series of age-matched development crises that are binary and competing values. In Erikson’s theory, it has been difficult to create objectives to evaluate the identity of the theory. One of the most common methods used by Erikson for testing the theory is the biographical case study. This study is time-consuming, expensive, and hard to apply to a person who is undergoing role confusion. Piaget’s theories focus on how kids change the way they think about the world. Various limitations have been identified in this theory. For instance, it is hard for other researchers and learners to assess the importance of the theories’ general outcomes because they cannot be easily and precisely replicated. This is due to how Piaget used his terminologies when explaining the theories. The physical nature of Piaget’s theory does not fully explain the way children understand abstract words that do not relate to an immediate physical object. During the study, the theory attributed to each child’s intellectual development to the individual’s cognitive reaction to the environment. Kohlberg’s theory focuses on the moral thinking of the kids and they grow. Kohlberg did not take into account the fact that individualistic cultures stress personal rights, while collectivist cultures emphasize the significance of the community of the society. The theory is also gendered biased because all the subjects in the sample used were male. According to Kohlberg, women tend to remain at the third level of moral growth since they place sturdier stress on things such as social relations and the well-being of others.
Question 2
Explain why people in non-Western cultures tend to “somatize” their distress, whereas people in Western cultures tend to “psychologize” it.
People in non-western cultures tend to somatize their distress, while people in western cultures tend to psychologize it. Persons in non-western cultures have a habit of presenting suffering in a somatic way, through corporeal indications. Various researches have been indicated reduced depression rates in non-western countries along with high rates of a syndrome that shares many physical symptoms with depression. Most Chinese personalities tend to somatize because they sanction somatic symptoms to a greater degree than those in western individuals. Americans recognize an advanced amount of somatic symptoms than the Chinese did. Low rate of depression in non-western cultures shows an honest rarity of depression, low level of reporting of depressive symptoms, culturally-based differences in the expression of symptoms of depression, and issues. Another reason for a low prevalence rate is that the Chinese may be less susceptible to depression due to their socially reinforced character traits and coping mechanisms. There are other character traits such as quiescence and stoicism, and the traditional concept of fatalism that may also contribute to their acceptance of depression as the Chinese are prepared to face a predetermined life of suffering. Because of these characteristics, the Chinese may view emotional illnesses as a part of life and apply a higher threshold than the Westerners for considering responses to life’s stressors as pathological. Emotion suppression has consistently been linked to several adverse outcomes such as increased experiences of negative emotions and depressed moods among European Americans. Research has linked self-construal to the psychological well-being of Asian and European Americans. Social anxiety and depression were found to correlate negatively with independent self-construal and positively with interdependent self-construal in a correlation study of European and Asian Americans. Various analyses conducted revealed that the relationship of somatization with mental health depends on culture. Also, the disparity in mental health was greatest and favored the U.S. adults at low levels of somatization, but the disparity in mental health between countries disappeared as somatization increased.
Question 3
Explain and give examples of micro-aggressions
Microaggression is the intentional or the unintentional communication of derogatory, hostile and negative prejudicial slights and insults towards any group, especially the marginalized group. It also includes the daily exchanges that pass denigrating messages to specific persons due to their group membership. The individual making the comments may be unaware and well-intentioned of the possible outcome of their words. The message passed sometimes appear harmless to the observers but is considered as a form of covert racism or daily discrimination. Macroaggression is an extreme form of racism and is experienced by individuals who are stigmatized the most. The people receiving it suffer the most because they are denied by those committing them. According to …..Microaggression statements involve statements that affirm or repeat stereotypes about a minority group. These statements place the main culture as standard and the marginal one as abnormal or compulsive, express displeasure of the marginal group, don that all marginal group associates are similar, minimalize the presence of discernment against the marginal group and pursue to repudiate the committer’s prejudice.
Examples of microaggression include when individuals assume that people of color are from different counties of foreigners when people of color are labeled as being bright or presumed to be at a certain level of cleverness depending on their race. Renunciation of racial reality is another macroaggression whereby an individual emphasizes that the people of color do not face the problem of discrimination, which implies that they do not face inequality. Refusing to acknowledge the intra-ethnic differences whereby the sameness of broad cultural groups is stressed and presumed; the chatterer overlooks intra-ethnic variances.
Question 4
Compare and give examples of conformity in collectivist and individualist cultures.
Collectivist and individualist cultures can be contrasted in many ways. For instance, collectivism emphasizes on the significance of the community while individualism stresses most on the rights and concerns of each individual. Unity and selflessness are highly valued in a collectivist culture. In individualistic cultures, independence personal identity is highly emphasized. For instance, workers who reside in a collectivist culture tend to strive to sacrifice their joy for the greatness and happiness of the group. Those in individualistic cultures always feel that their goals and wellbeing and important compared to that of the group. Various cultures have various influences on the way people in society behave. For example, individuals in individualistic cultures describe themselves in terms of characteristics and personality traits; like I am intelligent and funny. While those in collectivist cultures describe themselves with regards to their social relationships and responsibility- like I am a good neighbor and friend.
According to the research conducted by….collectivist cultures are characterized by lower relational movement a term to define how many chances persons in a society have to establish relations with individuals of their selecting. It is difficult to develop new relationships with people in collectivist cultures because it may be hard to meet them. Strangers tend to remaining strangers those in the collectivistic cultures compared to how they would be to individuals in individualistic cultures. People from collectivist cultures are less likely to talk about their problems with their close friends and relatively compared to those in individualistic cultures. Collectivist cultures are highly unenthusiastic to debate stressors with persons they are close to out of worry for possibly undesirable interpersonal outcomes.
Question 5
Research shows, with some exceptions, that individuals from Western countries are more likely to display a strong internal locus of control than individuals from non-Western countries. Explain these findings
Locus of control is a concept of psychological literature. Locus of control is a person’s belief system regarding the causes of his or her experiences and the factors to which that individual attributes success or failure. Various researches conducted reveal that individuals from Western countries are more likely to display a strong internal locus of control than individuals from non-Western countries. Those individuals from western countries attribute their success to their efforts and abilities. They often expect to succeed and thus motivated to learn more. Most of Those from the non-western cultures possess the external locus of control. They attribute their success to fate or luck; they make less effort needed to learn. They mostly experience anxiety because they believe that they have no control over their lives. There is more internal loss of internal locus among individuals in western countries because of how children are brought up in western countries. The children are raised by their parents who encourage them to be independent and also help them learn the relationship between actions and their consequences. The children grow up with greater confidence in their ability to influence the outcomes through their actions. They are also likely to have higher self- esteem in their adult lives. It may also be because the concept of locus of control was established in the US to echo American opinions of control, and studies have inclined to use either US-based scales or scales that were patterned on them.
Question 6
What is the highest form of religious bonding? Describe it.
The highest form of religious bonding depends on a specific culture. Religion is about beliefs and also self-transcendent skills that bond a person with what he or she notices to be the superior realism with others, and with the inner-self. This happens mostly within a ritualized outline, whether private -prayer and meditation or open –worship and religious ceremonies, recurrent and even, or excellent. Even in self-oriented spiritual occurrences like meditation, the objective is to link with a profound realism that exceeds the daily authenticity and the self. The presence of spiritual rites and the familiarity of connected emotions look somewhat worldwide through beliefs and religions. There is a huge variety of sacred rites that have more exact and separate purposes, resemble precise instants in life routes and precise life occasions, and provoke numerous emotions that perhaps vary depending on the experience. What is possibly generally mutual across rituals, religions, and beliefs is the emotional self-transcendence that individuals experience or search for using religious rituals and the inter-individual erraticism in the incidence and strength of these occurrences.
There have been various theories that consider the emotional and ritualized scopes of religion to be different from each other. From my viewpoint, this is a priori comprehensible. Rituals frequently have, among others, an enchanted purpose: They are achieved with the belief or hope that opinions and performances if done properly, may impact other areas of the outside realism minus physical interaction. A practical exploration for enchanted competence through rites may, therefore, appear, at the main glimpse, far detached from the pursuit of undergoing self-transcendent emotions. Yet, looking for an advanced order factor, it is under the expressive role of religion that the ceremonial element hysterics best.
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