Studying Comparative Cultural Transmission: What Socializes Members for Group Living?
The first lecture will examine how culture is transmitted across generations, addressing the questions of how groups are taught in their context to: How to use tools effectively? How to think practically to make sense of the world? How to work and live together with others properly? What actions to endorse and how strongly? Conduct comparative cultural inquiry helps us try to understand how people are socialized to serve group requirements for group survival and group flourishing and realize the diversity across our multi-group world (families, teams, organizations, provinces, nations). The lecture discusses the cultural training of babies, education and moral standards, artifacts/tools and their functions, and how these can be observed, studies, and incorporated into cross-cultural research designs.
Re-examining, Designing, and Testing Models for Comparative Culture Research
Reviewing the varied processes of socialization, this lecture will move toward considering how these elements might fit into “eco-cultural models” or dimensions of national difference. The specific case of cultural influences on gender socialization or issues of equality will be considered. Further discussion will explore how diverse socialization foci affect variations of building of human capital in/across different cultures. Discussion will focus on ways that cross-cultural and intercultural scholars can seek to understand their cultural context in relation to others, and how these perspectives could be integrated into research designs. Leading examples of dimensional models, values and beliefs frameworks, and other explanatory factor models will be discussed in the context of developing meaningful research in China that can contribute to the cross-cultural field and understanding intercultural dynamics across cultures.
