Cross Culture

Cross Culture

1. Introduction.

   • Cross-culture in psychology is conducted to settle the debate of nuture verses nature.
   • Some people believe that behaviour is learned, so they're on the nuture side. Whereas some believe our behaviour is innate, this is the nature side.
   • If everyone all over the world acted the same this would suggest that nature was the cause. If there are differences between cultures it would suggest that we have learnt our behaviours

2. Van Ijendoorn and Kroonenburg 1988.

   • Carried out a meta-analysis of 32 studies of the strange situation from a variety of countries, based on the observation of over 2000 children.
   • Secure attachments are most common among all cultures.
   • China, UK, USA, Japan and Israeli
   • There is a difference in the distribution of insecure attachments. Insecure avoidant are more common in individualistic cultures that raise children to be independent, eeg Germany. Whereas insecure ambivalant attachments are more common in collectivistic cultures such as Japan where the children are raised to be part of the community/

3. Evaluation

   • Low ecological validity as the strange situation is abnormal and very controlled, therefore it can not represent real life and so the findings cannot be generalisable beyond the research setting.
   • The studies may suffer from demand characteristics such as the mother being more loving towards the child in order to seem like a good parent. This may confuse the child and they may not react normally, as they won't understand the change in treatment. This lowers the results vaildity.
   • There are ethical issues with the strange situation, babies are put under stress delibrately, making them cry is part of the proceedure. The study can be critisized for this as babies won't understand that it's part of an experiment so it could possibly have ill effects on later life.
   • The study does have high population validity due to using over 2000 children of all different cultures around the world, using 32 studies of the strange situation. However the strange situation is a tool of measurement designed for Western countries where children may be brought up differently to elsewhere. So the findings cannot be generalised beyond to other cultures where child upbringing practises may differ
   • Assumes that country = culture where as there is more likely to be differences of culture within countries than between.