The Dive of Culture into Cognition and Perception

This week, we have read about the various ways of cultural influence on our cognition and perception. The article points out that culture affects our cognitions and perceptions in an indirect way, through social orientation. This indirect causation is supported with various aspects such as ecology, common occupations in a society and etc. In order to stay away from repetition, in this blog, I will try to stay away from summarizing the article and also try to point out different aspects heavily focusing on today.

I think the aspects we should focus on should not be restricted with the causality between culture and cognition/perception. First of all, with the affects of a more globalized and modernized world, individuals are easily exposed to a newer and a more inclusive culture that is mostly affected by the western media. Even though there are still many rural regions in the world that are not affected by this, most of the people do not hunt or fish for their lives anymore. We started to live most of our lives in a more cyber-level. Article points out the aspects such as individuals may go through changes in their cognitions/perceptions when exposed to a different culture on their own; or the affects of culture develop with us as we grow and may have certain milestones in specific ages. We are the children of a new world, full of ones and zeros. For example, our attention span is heavily influenced by the short videos on social media. Maybe we started to live our lives as TV shows and perceive ourselves as the main character. The fact that whether we think holistically or analytically mostly depends on the types of content we consume.  I believe there is also a circulation in this situation. This new culture may heavily affect our cognitions, but we also heavily affect this culture itself. This vicious circle thickens more each day.

Returning back to the article, I would like to explain my thoughts a bit. I think it is especially crucial to not be stuck into the east-west dichotomy. This kind of generalizability my result in wrongfully clustering the cultures. Two eastern cultures may also differentiate heavily from themselves. And also, the cultural effects on cognition/perception through human development is a whole new research area. Cultures may differentiate in terms of affecting the individual in certain ages. Why and how some cultures start to influence individuals in the ages that they do is a question that should have the answer in the psychology literature.

I really enjoyed what I learned from the articles. I think the cultural differences and the causal affects were explained very clearly and all of these differences felt very concrete to me. In earlier weeks, we have learnt that how culture affects our neurology and I think this week we really delved into the psychology of it. Finally, we divide cultures as eastern-western or independent-interdependent, but if we imagine there are other ways that cultures differentiate from themselves, we also have to imagine different ways of effect regarding cognition and perception. The thought of this really excites me.