Cultural Differences - Acquired or Hard-Wired?
I just watched a documentary on Cultural Psychology.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1662427912715121093#
They compared Asian and western perception of the person in connection to others. They call the western culture independent, and the Asian culture interdependent. This seems quite similar to my dichotomy between the individualistic and the particlistic identity.
Cultural influences of the personality are acquired and I understand the documentary as comparing cultures.
But it leads me to a speculative question. If external distinctions between populations, like the form of the eyes and the color of the skin, are inherited, could the end points of the scale of hypoanimality to animality also be inherited and differ?
Are the observed cultural differences an expression of the predominance of different hard-wired tendencies in the brain, or are the different cultures overriding in a different way, what is equally hard-wired? Is culture determined by the hard-wiring, or is the hard-wiring differently modified by different cultures?
Does more hard-wired hypoanimality in western societies cause the independent individualistic identity, or does the culture of a more independent identity allow the hard-wired hypoanimality to be expressed and perceived more often and more freely?
I just watched a documentary on Cultural Psychology.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1662427912715121093#
They compared Asian and western perception of the person in connection to others. They call the western culture independent, and the Asian culture interdependent. This seems quite similar to my dichotomy between the individualistic and the particlistic identity.
Cultural influences of the personality are acquired and I understand the documentary as comparing cultures.
But it leads me to a speculative question. If external distinctions between populations, like the form of the eyes and the color of the skin, are inherited, could the end points of the scale of hypoanimality to animality also be inherited and differ?
Are the observed cultural differences an expression of the predominance of different hard-wired tendencies in the brain, or are the different cultures overriding in a different way, what is equally hard-wired? Is culture determined by the hard-wiring, or is the hard-wiring differently modified by different cultures?
Does more hard-wired hypoanimality in western societies cause the independent individualistic identity, or does the culture of a more independent identity allow the hard-wired hypoanimality to be expressed and perceived more often and more freely?
