Human Mind

Ashtani Brown

Instructor Name

Course Number

26 October 2019

Culture, Psychology, and Mind

The term "Culture" is usually and expansively used to define human thoughts and behaviors that are not or cannot be attributed to genetics. It is also used to define how humans conceptualize their societies. Some portrayals of cultural differences have endorsed them mainly to cognitive characteristics. In addition to describing the situation from a cognitive point-of-view, the existing data shows that all or most human functions are present to define different cultures. For the human mind that is alien to other cultures, the dissimilarities are usually clearly and directly recognizable in several areas such as dressing, languages, etc. and the differences also become clear in such inconstant characteristics such as gender attitudes. The studies conducted to clarify the relation between culture and psychology have been wide-ranging and highly truth revealing as they have usually failed to notice the cultural biases of the discipline of Western psychology CITATION Pit07 \l 3081 (Laungani).

Studies of variances in psychological outcomes in different cultures have shown a large number of psychological occurrences which differ from culture to culture. In short, the Western onlooker cannot, in a large number of examples, be certain that their results would be duplicated in another culture, and thus may not be favorable as the standard for having oversight about human psychology. Nonetheless, the cultural bond between people in a culture is the main focus of the paradox. The different cultures are characterized by long-surviving standards and several hostilities of general human behavior, where the behavioral bond can be made and broken within short intervals of time.

Consider the sudden and rather explosive growth of social media on the World Wide Web and the rapid changes and rejections regarding our fashions, in modern history. At these contemporary times, we have a minute but tangible evidence of the reasons for numerous cultural diversities. Our closest neighbor in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzees, have evolved some basic cultural characteristics, usually in the area of foraging for food and preparing it, but beyond that, they still leave open the basis of the multitude of human cultural characteristics CITATION MWe18 \l 3081 (Wesch).

The culture into which we are born is not as permanent and fixated as we suppose it to be. We can experience a lot of visible and invisible changes that may adjust to the main patterns that may occur in variable degrees throughout our lifetime, and it will be problematic, hard and challenging to give a consistent explanation of these transformations. At the end of this progression is a steady and rational explanation that, for some people, their cultural features can change from one cultural description and meaning to a significantly different and often diverse one.

In short, we may want our peers that ‘Why’ and ‘How’ our cultures have developed and changed. There are clear, noticeable and debatable conditions of our world that determine these sudden or evolutionary cultural characteristics. Some of them are climate change, natural topography, proximity to a more powerful culture and natural resources. But these influences do not account for all cultural differences, and in particular, for the essential and evitable differences, that may occur regarding language. And each of these issues and complications requires a detailed set of plans that create these changes CITATION Wal98 \l 3081 (Goldschmidt). Currently, there are few studies in these directions. But still, we are far from getting close to the explanation of proposed culture-free human psychology, if that is possible at all.

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY Goldschmidt, Walter. Understanding Human Society. 1998.

Laungani, Pittu D. Understanding Cross-Cultural Psychology: Eastern and Western Perspectives. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2007.

Wesch, M. The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology. 2018.