I Get Emotional About Life – Week 1

This week’s chapters were literally all I asked for. While reading, my mind was occupied with questions all the time. I had a feeling that cultural psychology was going to be fun but I had no idea it was going to be mindblowing and addicting. Throughout the week I couldn’t stop thinking about everything from a cultural perspective, which I learned quickly, should be the standard (?). Maybe not in my everyday life but at least in my academic life. The skills and confidence I gained just from reading 2 chapters from a handbook is unbelievable.

My Questions

Although I take a lot of notes as I read, I took regular breaks just to collect my thoughts and questions on the paper reading these two chapters. At first, I felt a bit slow and under-educated about the topic, but that feeling quickly went away as I understood that I was just very really interested. While the second chapter was relatively harder to ask questions and add comments because it was about the history of the field, I wrote down a total of 39 questions for the first one. Here are some of my questions, some I consider relevant and some just fun to think about:

• Can influencers be “culture ambassadors” because they do have the power to (maybe) create or at least contribute to and spread  “ideas, values, attitudes, mindsets, schemas, and stereotypes”? And just how much power do they have?
  • Are what we call “xyz aesthetic” just microcultures? (e.g. the recent “tradwife aesthetic” with more conservative values, the “clean girl aesthetic”, or “y2k”?
• Can culture be a way of collective thinking – if I was an alien completely unknowing of “culture” as a concept, would I think humans with the same cultures were telepathic?
• Just how much are we motivated by creating and trying to apply our own culture in our social realm?
• So if psychology considers “guiding what the individual should be doing and how to be a person” one of the most important functions of cultures, what relationship does culture have with personality disorders, or any mental illness at all, as their symptoms may include inability to orient their life and loss of individuality?
  • How much of a problem does not “belonging or fitting in” cause in mental illnesses from a cultural perspective?
• Can we talk about a culture of anything? E.g. the culture of this one coffee shop I go to, the culture of being an iPhone user, or the culture of having glasses instead of contact lenses, or the culture of a friend group, or a family?
  • Is personality an individual culture – made up of several different microcultures?
• If your occupation makes you adopt a more independent or interdependent view of self or behavior, and some of the core values recruiters looking for like “multi-tasking” or even “team player”  can be associated with either one of these perspectives; how much do recruiters consider cultural influences in the workplace, can or should they assess a culture for a specific workplace and recruit accordingly?
• From a cultural perspective, is saying someone is “anormal”, or even “weird” just a rude way of saying we don’t understand their culture?

Thoughts & Feelings

As this was a week of introduction, I found the chapters very successful in teasing the concepts I’m sure have more depth to them. Overall, it was very enjoyable to think about culture as an invitation. I had great satisfaction from my perspective changing from culture being a separate entity from the individual, to the individual being a part of it. It was almost annoying to try to understand different types of cultural mechanisms, like trying to think of myself as an independent person. I just couldn’t get myself to think like that! Still, I am convinced that everyone is multicultural and intersectional – and it is complicated. This was great motivation not only for the other courses I am taking, but even for thinking of new defense mechanisms for my personal life, and trying to bring other perspectives of how I view myself and others.