Week 13

Learner Objective: Social and cultural environments affects behavior

Baseball fans find the old-style baseball announcer voices familiar with their enunciated, tinny sound but where does it come from?  Professors at Duke University say that the unique sound is called Transatlantic speech and is a specific style taught in acting schools to this day.  The technique is taught to acting students in an effort to eliminate the regional dialects of the day and make it easier for anyone listening to understand it.


This represents the learner objective because baseball announcers learned to speak this way due to their environment.  It is an example of Social Learning Theory where the students learn a behavior from an elder and eventually display the behavior in their own way.  Thus, social and cultural environments affect behavior.

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Visual Week 4

This visual is from Bandura's famous experiment that first explained social learning theory.  The child is seen displaying aggressive behavior towards a doll after observing an adult act in a similar fashion.

Social Learning Theory

The social learning theory says that humans learn from observing others, as first seen in the Bobo doll experiment.  Another study by Indiana University says that children who observe social bullying or aggression on TV are likely to carry out these undesirable actions.  This is partially due to the fact that the behaviors are normally presented in a humorous manner instead of being chastised for it.

This represents how humans learn through interaction with others and that these actions are not always socially acceptable even if they are seen in public.

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Visual Week 3

This graph shows how incorrect stereotypes can cause change in the behavior of humans.  Under stereotypical threat blacks performed significantly lower than when they were not under the threat of their less intelligent stereotype.

Errors in Attribution

Because culture is so ingrained in humans they often make errors in attributing traits that sometimes cause them to appear in the people who are wrongly being classified.   For example in a study by Steve Woods he found that the differences in IQs of blacks versus whites were at their highest when there was the most racism.  In the 1960s and 1970s the gap between blacks and whites' IQs were much higher than they are now, where there is almost no racism.

Therefore, it is not an actual difference in intelligence that causes the gap but the incorrect delegation of traits that created a reaction in blacks to make themselves less smart.

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Visual Week 2

This visual demonstrates the traits assigned to men and women because of their culture.  However, as some studies have proven this is not entirely accurate in many cases.

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.

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