2/18/2021;Week 07; Response to Culture and Psychology

Culture generates expectations about how the self should act in society. These cultural expectations can be a double-edged sword. They can create psychologically positive effects. Or they can impact people negatively,  to the extent that individuals sometimes behave irrationally.

For example, before the white men came to America, the Cherokee Indians assigned men the responsibility to hunt and the women were assigned to the farm. Man would not do farming; it was shameful. Farming was for women. Later when the settlers invaded the Cherokee land, the Indian men started farming in order to fit into the American society. It was very humiliated for Cherokee men to farm because they believe it was a feminine task. It took many generations of Cherokees to accept this new perspective.

All races tend to live up or down to cultural expectations. Psychologists Joshua Aronson and Claude Steele presented an interesting study. They took two groups of black and white college students and gave them the Graduate Record Examination. The GRE is an exam that students take to enter graduate school.

When the first group of students took the exam, there was not a question asking to identify their race. The black students, who are stereotyped as inferior in academics, consciously or subconsciously understood that the person grading the test did not know they were black. The black scholars’ test performance was average. However, when the second group of students took the exam, the first question was to identify their race. The black students’ test performance decreased by 50 percent when they were asked their race.

Sometimes we might or we might not be able to fulfill the expectations of our own culture or the culture where we live in. I believe that as long as the expectations are not affecting your hopes, wishes, and aspirations, negatively is okay to live up to such ideas. I strongly believe that we need to know who we really are and embrace it, that is what is called our real self.  In contrast, the ought self is the representation of self-standards of whom we should become. If these guidelines and ideas are not linked to what others want us to be but to what we are capable to become according to our own abilities, they can be potential motivators.

 “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” 






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