Monday, April 8, 2013

Limitations of Cultural Dimensions

Although cultural dimensions can be used to describe many human behaviors it is, like most singular areas of psychology, reductionist.  To say that one's behavior is only influenced by their culture is to reject their genes and all other factors as being part of their psychological makeup.

A study that exemplifies this is Carothers's study to determine whether traits usually associated with boys and traits usually associated with girls were actually as polar as often believed.  She obtained data from over 13,000 individuals and found that traits like sex drive were not nearly as different between men and women as culture makes them out to be.  So, her experiment shows how cultural dimensions can be limiting in studying psychology.

Source Article

No comments:

Post a Comment