Culture in the Blender

I imagine that most readers of this blog would be interested in FlightBliss, a blog all about how to wrangle your way into Business or First for as little money as possible. How useful is that?

Today’s fun fact about culture and psychology: If you have a high need for closure, you are more likely to make culturally typical decisions. Conversely, if you have a low need for closure, you are more likely to make a culturally atypical decision, like attribute agency to a group if you’re North American or attribute [...]

I learned something interesting in my culture and psychology class the other day. Americans think that the world is more malleable than the self. (Whereas Chinese, and probably most everyone else, think that the self is more malleable than the world.) Maybe that’s why so many Americans play their music out loud without headphones on [...]

Recently, I came across an article entitled Loving Those Who Justify Inequality: The Effects of System Threat on Attraction to Women Who Embody Benevolent Sexist Ideals. It found that when men felt like their country was being criticized by a foreigner, they were more attracted to women who clearly had incorporated belevolent sexism than to [...]

A visualization popped into my head late last night of the culture networks I wrote about in my previous post, and it wants to get out. So here it is.
Two culture networks within a bicultural person

Blue circles are cultural ideas from the blue culture. They are connected to each other to make a network of [...]

In my free time, I’ve been looking for more papers relating to the TCK experience. One of them, Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition, is arguing for a paradigm shift in how culture is viewed.
The effort to identify the knowledge that varies between but not within large cultural groups had led [...]

One of the most obvious differences between the United States and Europe is how racism is structured. In some ways, racism in Europe seems rather simple. Perhaps it seems simple to me in part because I’ve seen it so much more than in the US, but the key concept seems to be xenophobia. The people [...]

While reading worldculturenet, I saw a link from Greg Helden’s blog discussing a Stanford-MIT-University of New York at Stony Brook study that shows differences in how visual information is processed in Americans and East Asians. (The MIT press release can be found here. The reference for those of you with access is Hedden, T., Ketay, [...]

Although by all standards I should be in bed, I’m procrastrinating my trolling the blogosphere. I found a very interesting interview with Aida Seif el-Dawla and Rabab el-Mahdi in the Guardian Unlimited. Both are corageous activists and feminists in Egypt, and in the article provide just the kind of explanation of context and feminist analysis [...]

This semester, I’ve arranged to audit a very exciting-sounding class: Cultural Psychology. The course description is
Centers on cross-cultural study of substantive areas such as personality, motivation, socialization, interpersonal behavior, psychological environments, cognition and cognitive development, ethnocentrism and stereotypes, and visual perception; emphasis on methodological limitations and contributions of cross-cultural study; and discussion of current problems [...]