The Effect of Culture on Perception (AQA GCSE Psychology)

Cultural differences in perception

• Culture refers to the products of socialisation within a specific society which may be centred around:

  • National

  • Ethnic

  • Religious

  • Geographical characteristics

• Culture is manifest in two ways:

  • Outwardly e.g. through food, song, dance, rituals, traditions etc. 

  • Inwardly e.g. through beliefs, attitudes, superstitions etc.

• Cross-cultural research into perception is designed to investigate whether perception is innate

  • In which case it will be experienced in the same way regardless of where someone lives/their cultural group

• Or whether perception is learned

  • In which case perception will show differences across cultures

• The visual cues present in a person’s physical environment may determine how they perceive the world around them e.g. if I grow up surrounded by open fields will I still see the world in the same way as someone who has grown up in a crowded city?

• Hudson (1960) conducted a study into the effects of culture on perception as follows:

  • A diverse range of participants from South Africa were used:

    • some of the participants were educated, and some were not (the educated participants were used to seeing 2-D images in books)

  • The participants were shown a range of hunting images in 2-D

    • The images depicted a hunter aiming a spear with an elephant and an antelope also present in the image

  • In each image the hunter and animals were placed slightly differently, with changing backgrounds (see below)

  • Hudson found that the participants who had been educated (exposed to images in books) had depth perception and were able to use monocular depth cues (e.g. height in plane) to determine which animal the hunter was pointing the spear at and who was nearer in the image

  • Hudson concluded that culture affects perception (access to education and a specifically Westernised style of education is likely to lead to the development of specific depth cues)

Culture on Perception Diagram

Hudson’s (1960) images were used to test cultural differences in perception.

• Another cultural difference in perception is the carpentered-world hypothesis which suggests that people from industrialised countries (Westerners) are so used to living in built-up environments consisting of straight lines and angles that illusions such as the Ponzo trick them but do not trick people who have grown up in highly open, rural environments (Brislin, 1993)

Evaluation of the effect of culture on perception

Strengths

• Research such as Hudson (1960) goes some way towards demonstrating that culture plays a key role in how perception develops i.e. it is not a universal phenomenon experienced in the same way regardless of the environment

• Culture has been found to affect other cognitive processes such as memory (see the effect of cultural schemas in Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ study) which gives the theory validity

Weaknesses

• One of the issues in conducting cross-cultural research is that the task given by the researchers may not be equally applicable to all cultures e.g. the instructions provided may be overly confusing or mis-translated 

• Hudson’s study was published in 1960 which means that it may lack relevance for a modern population due to the effects of globalisation and access to social media