Culture encompasses the characteristics of a society or group that distinguish it from other societies and groups. This includes the language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts of a people as well as the ideas and beliefs of the group. According to the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, culture is a “system of shared patterns of behavior and interaction, cognitions and understanding that are learned by socialization.”
It may be regarded as a system of human learning, a collective programming of the human mind, which influences behaviors through an interplay between genetic and environmental factors. This is what sets culture apart from the instincts of subhuman animals, and is what makes man a culture animal, as opposed to a brute animal.
The power of culture is such that it can hold the sex urge in check and enable premarital chastity, or even force a person to disembowel himself to remove a stain of dishonor. It can also prevent a person from starving to death, though food is available, because the culturally sanctioned definition of what is clean and unclean dictates which foods are palatable.
There are many definitions of culture and how it manifests itself in the world around us, from a broad view that considers all aspects of a society or group to the more narrow definition that is considered the essence of humankind. The most common definition of culture is a set of attitudes, values, beliefs and traditions that are inherited from one generation to the next and that influence the way a person thinks and behaves.
It is the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, hierarchies, notions of time, roles and concepts of space that are passed down to future generations by the members of a community. The accumulated knowledge, beliefs, values and traditions of a culture are what differentiate it from the culture of another community.
Any functioning group of relating humans – dyads, families, classrooms, schools, companies, types of organizations, ethnic communities, nations and supra-national bodies – has a culture. It is this culture that defines and regulates how the members interact to achieve group survival and flourishing within the scope of ambient constraints and affordances.
Cultural Expression
There are numerous ways that a culture can express its ideas, traditions and heritage through art, music and literature. These are often seen as the most effective means of conveying a culture because they create an emotional connection between the viewer and the work, helping to shape and reinforce its cultural identity.
The six articles featured in this Spotlight Series go beyond simply showing that culture matters and look at how the various dimensions of culture shape and influence both individual and organizational behavior and development. They continue a tradition of questioning conventional practices in psychology that began several decades ago and demonstrate how a more sophisticated conceptualization of culture can help illuminate new substantive directions for our investigations of behavior and development.