Full file at
Chapter Contents
Chapter Outline / 24Resources / 34
Lecture/Discussion Ideas / 34
- As Nature Made Him
- Evolution: Entering the Debate
- Mother Love?
- Culture and the Origin of Good
- Culture: Are People the Same Everywhere?
- History of Science
- Social Capital
- Paper Clip = House
- Time
- Alive
- Taste Preference
- The Pill
- Culture and Sex
- Deep Survival
- Is Conscious Decision Making Better?
- The Evolution of Evil
- The Cultural Animal
Class Activity/Demonstration Ideas / 40
- Fact or Fiction (Handout 2-1)
- Pancakes or Waffles?
- Evolution: Knives, Spoons, and Hands
- Culture: Simulation Games
- The Light Bulb
- Charades
- Food Rituals
- Penguin Reproduction
- Stroop Effect
- Driving Automatically
- Stop!
- Cultural Questions Activity
- Think/Pair/Share—Culture Says Stop (Handout 2-3)
Student Projects/Homework / 44
- X: A Fabulous Child’s Story
- Evolution: Reproduction
- Other Cultural Animals?
- Analyzing Cultural Behavior
- Culture and the Case of Shackleton
- Culture and Fiction
- Civilization and Its Discontents
- Division of Labor
- Where Does Your Food Come From?
- Slow Foods Movement
- Kinsey Institute Sex Knowledge Test
- Tradeoffs
- Automatic Actions
- Cultural Questions
Video/DVD Suggestions / 49
Handouts / 52
- 2-1 Fact or Fiction
- 2-2Think/Pair/Share—Culture Says Stop
- 2-3Culture and the Case of Shackleton
OUTLINE
I.Chapter Prologue
A.The “Brenda” Story
1.As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto
2.Boy who, because of a circumcision accident, had his penis removed shortly after birth and was raised until his teen years as a girl.
B.The Limits of Socialization
1.Given the boy’s difficulty in adjusting to his female identity, the story suggests that gender differences are not solely because of socialization.
2.Innate differences constrain what parental care, teaching and other socialization experiences can affect.
3.Both nature and experience are important to explaining human behavior.
II.Nature and Social Behavior
A.Explaining the Psyche
1.The psyche is a broader term for mind, including all psychological processes (emotions, perceptions, desires, etc.).
2.Analogyof someone on a deserted island, who has no experience with electricity or cans, trying to determine the purpose of an electric can opener.
3.To understand the psyche, we have to understand what it was designed for. And nature and culture have shaped the psyche to be what it is.
4.Often nature and culture (or nurture) are pitted against each other. One example of this debate is with homosexuality. Result of genes or of experience?
5.Some have argued that nature is primary, culture builds on it.
6.This book argues for interaction—each shapes the other.
B.Nature Defined
1.Nature is the physical world around us, including its laws and processes.
2.In terms of human behavior a ‘nature’ explanation involves explanations referencing chemicals and/or electrical activity in the brain, or genes.
3.Behavior patterns are understood using evolutionary theory.
C.Evolution, and Doing What’s Natural
1.Thetheory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin, explains how change occurs in nature.
2.Most living things aim to prolong life through either going on living (which cannot go on forever) or through reproduction, which produces certain random changes over time.
3.What determines whether these changes remain in a species or not?
a.Natural selection is the process of competition by which certain traits are selected and endure and others disappear.
1)2 criteria for natural selection
a)Survival means living longer. The ability to survive depends in part on how well adapted an organism is to its circumstances.
b)Reproduction—passing along one’s genes. Biologists emphasize this as the more important criteria for natural selection.
i)Mutation is a new gene or combination of genes. Mutations are selected when they promote not only survival but increase the probability of reproduction.
b.Gender Differences and Evolutionary Theory
1)Men can father many children by having sex with many women and therefore, men who desire many partners were more likely to pass on their genes.
2)Women can mother about one child per year and are more likely to have children survive with the help of a partner. Women, therefore, who prefer lasting, committed relationships were more likely to pass on their genes.
D.Social Animals
1.Consider the difference between trees and animals. Both interact with their world, but doing so is more complicated for an animal than a tree.
2.Animals that are not loners have discovered, or nature has discovered for them, that interacting with the world works better if they live and work together.
3.Being social is a strategy that provides benefits in terms of survival and reproduction for such animals.
4.The down side of being social is that it is harder to achieve than a solitary life, requiring powerful and complex brains.
E.The Social Brain
1.Social animals require brains with more complexity and flexibility.
2.Bigger brains are not linked with larger territories or eating better food.
3.Bigger brains are linked with larger and more complex social organization. It evolved as such to help us understand each other better.
4.A theme of this text, then, is that inner processes serve interpersonal functions.
III.Culture and Human Social Life
A.Social Animal or Cultural Animal?
1.As social animals we seek connections with others. We live, work, and play together.
a.Many other animals are just as, if not more social.
b.What makes humans different is culture.
1)Few animal species show any but the rudiments of culture.
2)Humans rely on culture.
c.Being cultural animals is what sets humans apart from other animals. It is the view that evolution shaped the human psyche so as to enable humans to create and take part in culture.
B.Culture Defined
1.Culture is difficult to define. Social scientists generally use culture to refer to what a large group of people have in common. It is an advanced way of being social, with nature progressing from plants, to solitary animals, to social animals, and finally cultural animals.
2.Shared Ideas
a.Enables those who don’t know each other, but share a culture, to interact.
b.Culture does not exist in/with a single person.
c.Does not preclude debate about how to implement or practice the shared beliefs.
3.Culture as System
a.Culture is a network that links many different people, but because of its dynamic nature it is more aptly described as a system.
b.Example of food: without hunting, fishing, or farming a family can eat because of a system of food delivery that involves farmers, factories, truckers, stores and many others.
c.The food system illustrates the theme the authors describe as “putting people first.” Many people in the modern world get their food from people, not from nature.
4.Culture as Praxis
a.Praxis refers to a practical way of doing things.
b.Debate among anthropologists whether culture is best understood as shared beliefs and values or a shared way of doing things. Likely both.
c.Example of Philadelphians sharing values as well as a way of doing things. Philadelphia works because most do things in the same way.
d.Praxis often depends on shared ideas.
5.Culture, Information, and Meaning
a.Meaningful information is shared in a culture and influences how people in that culture act.
b.Contrast of the food storage behaviors of humans and squirrels.
6.Summary
a.Culture is an information based system, involving both shared understandings and praxis, that enables groups of people to live together in an organized fashion and to get what they need.
C.Money Matters: Nature, Culture and Money
1.Although nearly all cultures use money, from the perspective of nature, it is an unusual phenomenon, as no plants or animals use it.
2.Why people work so long and hard for money? Two analogies explain this.
a.Money is a tool that helps people get what they want. But this analogy doesn’t explain hoarding behavior.
b.Money is like a drug, in that it takes advantage of the body’s capacity for pleasure. It functions like an addiction.
3.Research suggests some animals can learn rudimentary elements of dealing with money.
a.After months of training, monkeys did learn to trade coins for treats from humans.
b.But the monkeys rarely used the money amongst each other, and they occasionally tried to use cucumber slices as coins (as if they were interchangeable).
D.Food for Thought: Virtuous Vegetarians
1.With culture, eating is shaped by ideas and beliefs.
2.Humans share with non-human animals the need to eat and the avoidance of food that makes us sick.
3.Vegetarians, however, choose not to eat meat because they:
a.believe it is better for the planet.
b.want to reduce the suffering of other people.
c.believe in animal rights.
4.Individuals with particular religious views may choose not to eat certain foods.
5.These phenomena illustrate the power of cultural ideas to shape eating behavior in humans.
E.The Social Side of Sex
1.Debate over whether human sexuality is the result nature or nurture.
2.Those aspects of sexuality common across cultures may be rooted in nature.
a.In all cultures men have a desire for more sex partners than women.
b.Same basic sex practices known in most cultures.
c.All cultures have rules about sex.
d.All cultures have made efforts to control conception.
e.All cultures have some form of prostitution, although aspects of this vary substantially.
3.Some aspects of sexuality show influence of culture.
a.Examples from Guam, Turkey, Indonesia, Lebanon, New Guinea, the U.S., and England.
4.Differences within cultures as well
a.Age of first intercourse, number of sex partners, sexual positions used, interest in watching or reading about sex.
b.The commonalities, and the variance, in sexual practice illustrates that it is influenced by both nature and culture.
F.Nature and Culture Interacting
1.Nature’s interaction with culture can be seen in the relative age effect. Children who start school when they are older (by virtue of school district age cutoffs that they “just missed the cutoff to start a year ago) are more likely to be categorized as “gifted.”
2.This effect has been observed in sports like hockey, as well. Star athletes are not just born, nor are they simply made, it is nature interacting with culture that promotes success, including being born on the right side of the age cutoff dates.
3.The interaction can also be seen in construction of gender identity. Although the “Brenda” story at the outset of this chapter illustrates the strong biological influence on gender, other research suggests that “manhood” has strong cultural influences.
a.Many cultures require boys to “prove” their manhood.
b.Among American college students, loss of manhood is seen as due to social factors, whereas loss of womanhood is more difficult to fathom.
c.Threats to a man’s masculinity cause a man to feel aggressive and anxious, but parallel threats to a woman’s femininity provoke no such response.
4.Nature and Culture Shaping Each Other
a.Nature shapes culture, and vice versa.
1)In places where there are a large number of pathogens, collectivist cultures are more likely to arise, enforcing conformity as a means to reduce spread of disease.
2)Alhtough nature generally comes first, the human capacity for speech probably evolved in step with the emergence of the spoken language, a “co-evolution” of sorts.
G.What Makes Cultural Animals?
1.Many animals have some elements of culture, but it tends to be rare and rudimentary.
2.This is partly explained by the fact that most animals lack sufficient brainpower to sustain culture.
3.Other differences between social and cultural animals include
a.Social animals often work together, but cultural animals have elaborate division of labor with more varied, complex, and flexible roles amongst group members.
b.Social animals figure out good ways of doing things, but cultural animals preserve this knowledge and share it with the group to create progress.
c.Social animals communicate, but usually about the present. Cultural animals use language to communicate about the past, present, and future.
d.Social animals tend to help primarily kin; cultural animals have a broad sense of community and will help total strangers.
e.Social animals resolve disputes usually through aggression. Cultural animals have moral principles and laws that help them resolve conflicts without resorting to violence.
4.Humans survive and reproduce by means of their culture. Nature has shaped humans to “do” culture.
5.Culture is a better way of being social. As a biological strategy, culture has allowed the human population to increase, lifespan to increase, and habitation in an enormous variety of climates and terrains for humans.
H.Are People the Same Everywhere?
1.Culture influences food, language and other aspects of life.
2.Example of cultural differences in sleep
3.Cultural differences can be problematic for social psychologists. How do social psychologists find similarities if people are different across cultures?
4.But cultural differences are often a matter of degree rather than kind. This is a more optimistic view that general principles of social behavior can be meaningfully identified.
5.Goal in this book is to find the underlying similarities.
I.Summary
1.Culture provides many advantages for humans.
a.But requires many things: language, holding social roles while being flexible, thinking about complicated decisions and restraining impulses.
b.The requirements for culture may help us explain the human psyche.
IV.Important Features of Human Social Life
A.The Duplex Mind
1.Although many do not accept Freud’s account of the conscious and unconscious, there does seem to be two parts to the human mind.
a.A summary version is presented, with the acknowledgement that experts do not agree on what to call the two systems or the details of the systems.
2.Two Systems
a.Automatic System
1)Outside of consciousness
2)Does simple jobs automatically
a)Interpreting, categorizing and organizing information
b.Deliberate System
1)Likely the smaller ‘half’ of the system
2)Involves a small, but important part of what is in the mind
3)Working when the individual is awake
3.What is consciousness for?
a.Although many people believe it does, the conscious mind does not constantly direct one’s thoughts and actions.
1)Example of walking—something we do not consciously do.
b.Because the automatic system directs much of behavior (learning, thinking, choosing, responding) there is debate of what, if anything, the conscious mind is good for.
1)Gazzaniga concluded consciousness is a side effect of other processes
2)Others suggest that consciousness provides us emotional signals so we do not confuse our own actions with the actions of others.
c.Given its biological expense there are likely advantages provided by consciousness
1)Complex jobs involving combination of information, and logical reasoning are the realm of conscious thought.
4.Differences between the systems
a.Automatic system does many unrelated things at the same time. Consciousness does one thing at a time.
b.The automatic system does things quickly and efficiently. The deliberate system does things slowly and takes effort.
c.An advantage of the deliberate system is its flexibility. The automatic system has difficulty dealing with new or unfamiliar situations.
d.The deliberate system is needed for the complexity, involving novelty and unexpected situations, of the cultural society.
e.The deliberate system is also able to perform complex, logical reasoning.
f.One way to think of the decisions of the automatic system is the “go with your gut” feeling. Conscious thinking relies on careful reasoning. Kahneman refers to them as reasoning (deliberate system) and intuition (automatic system).
5.How they work together.
a.The automatic system works to make conscious thought possible.
1)The automatic system might work as an alarm for those instances when conscious thought is needed.
a)Example of an illogical comment on the radio: someone was injured at a party and therefore all parties are canceled on campus.
b)Your automatic system may have processed the sounds, understood the words and the gist of the message and activated your memory.
c)At that point it would alert the conscious mind to potential problems with the message where conscious thought is required.
6.Conscious Override
a.The conscious mind may override the automatic system
1)Example of wanting a donut but consciously deciding not to fight for the last one.
b.Humans often override aggressive impulses when frustrated, hot, or insulted.
c.Conscious override is necessary for culture
B.The Long Road to Social Acceptance
1.Culture has advantages but also many demands.
a.Contrast of a bird flying into town and finding a place to live versus a human moving into town and needing to find an apartment and a job (among other things).
b.For human beings finding a romantic partner is more complicated than for other animals.
2.Social acceptance is one of the basic jobs of individual humans.
C.Build to Relate
1.Human beings are built to relate to others.
2.Broad theme: inner processes serve interpersonal functions
a.Our psychological traits are designed to help us connect with others
b.Language and our emotional capacities of love and affection serve to connect us with others.
c.Social brain theory, the idea that evolution made larger brains for supporting social interaction, upholds this view.
d.When people talk, they tend to end up sharing their feelings, which promotes trust and bonding.
e.When cues make people think of members of a certain group, automatic processes start preparing those folks to interact with such group members.
f.Some inner processes do not serve interpersonal processes—hunger and thirst.
g.Contrast human inner processes to that of trees. Trees’ inner processes involve getting enough water and sunlight.Trees do not interact much with other trees. Culture is a better way for humans to be social.