Culture shapes cognition, including thought processes, perceptions, beliefs, and values. Socialization processes begin at birth and differ between individualist and collectivist cultures. Cultural cognition affects values and shapes laws, economic practices, and religious traditions.
The primary connection between culture and cognition is that different cultures provide a framework for each member’s thought processes, perceptions, beliefs, and degrees of importance assigned to various areas of daily life. One of the goals of studying cognition is to describe how different people see and react to the world around them. According to some theories of cognition, people form their own unique sets of behaviors based on external stimuli in their everyday environments. This particular idea often relates to the learning and socialization processes that take place in every culture. Socialization processes normally begin for members of any culture starting almost at the time of their birth.
Many psychologists who study culture and cognition report that the values and practices of a given culture have a profound impression on its members on a subconscious and even unconscious level. Some of their research shows a direct link between people’s cognitive patterns and whether they grew up in an individualist versus a collectivist culture. People raised in a collectivist culture typically see themselves as parts of a whole, and people in an individualistic culture perceive themselves as separate entities. The resulting differences are evident in areas such as visual perception and language. Some studies show that different people read text and see images in different directions depending on the cultures in which they were raised as children.
Various disciplines such as anthropology and sociology also often involve studies of culture and cognition. Researchers studying social cognition often report that people are taught different ideas about what is socially appropriate based on their cultures. These variations usually cause members of one culture to mentally process a certain behavior as positive, while another culture may perceive the same behavior as negative. For example, spitting on someone is considered an insult in some cultures, while other cultures see the same action as a blessing to banish harmful spirits. This example is just one of many related to intertwined culture and cognition.
The discipline of cultural cognition often refers to exactly how various cultures affect the values of their members. People who grow up in a culture that values individual success usually value individual freedoms more than certain practices that can benefit an entire society. This link between culture and cognition often shapes other areas such as the laws, economic practices, and even religious traditions of a given society’s accepted culture.
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