Culture has many influences on our daily behavior. Some of these effects are obvious. Americans watch football and baseball, while
Europeans watch soccer (which they consider to be the real football). Other
influences are less obvious, because they direct the kinds of information that
we pay attention to.
An interesting example of this role of culture was provided
in a paper in the February, 2012 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Igor Grossmann,
Phoebe Ellsworth, and Ying-Yi Hong. They
explored how cultures affect the way people pay attention to emotional
information in the environment.
The starting point for these studies is the observation that
Russian culture is stereotypically characterized by negative feelings. That is, Russians themselves will say that
they focus on negative feelings more often than Americans will.
In one study, American and Russian college students were
asked to study a series of pictures. Some
of these pictures were neutral pictures of clouds. Others were positive happy pictures, and
still others were negative sad pictures.
The participants were shown the pictures one at a time on a computer
screen and were told to press the space bar on the computer when they were done
studying each picture. They were told
that there would be a memory test later in the study. Compared to the neutral pictures of the
clouds, Americans looked at the positive pictures longer than the negative
pictures. In contrast, the Russians
looked at the negative pictures longer than the positive pictures.
Of course, there are many possible reasons for this result. Perhaps the negative pictures happened to
contain images that were particularly relevant or interesting to the Russians
for reasons other than the emotion expressed in the picture.
A second experiment used a clever manipulation of
culture. This study focused on Russian
Latvians. Latvian culture has more
European influences than Russian culture.
Russian Latvians are bicultural.
That is, they tend to show influences of both cultures.
In this study, participants were shown strings of letters
(like BRANE) and were asked whether the letters formed a word by pressing one
button if it was a word and another button if it was not. (In the case of BRANE, the answer would be
‘no’.) The strings of letters that were
actual words in this study were Latvian adjectives that were either positive
(like friendly) or negative (like lazy).
Here is the really clever part. Before seeing the string of letters,
participants saw pictures that were either symbols of Latvian culture, symbols
of Russian culture, or neutral pictures.
Previous work has shown that this procedure does a good job of priming
the cultural mindset related to the picture.
When these participants saw Latvian cultural symbols, they
responded more quickly to positive words than to negative words (compared to
the baseline of the neutral pictures).
When these same participants saw Russian symbols, they responded more
quickly to negative words than to positive words. This result reinforces the conclusion that
Russian culture leads people to pay more attention to negative information in
the environment.
These results are fascinating, because they suggest that
culture can affect your more general mood by affecting what you pay attention
to in the world. If your culture leads
you to look at positive things, then that will help to lift your mood. If your culture leads you to look at negative
things, then that will tend to depress your mood.
How can culture have an effect like this? One of the most powerful ways that cultures
affect our thinking is through communication.
If everyone around you is focused on sad things and they talk about sad
things, you will start to do the same thing.
In general, you want to be able to talk with the people around you. If you know that they are going to be
thinking about the sad aspects of life, you are going to start to look for that
sadness in order to be a part of the conversation. In the end, that affects the way you think,
even when you are not in a situation where you have to communicate with others.
