Cultural snapshots: Theory and method

Abstract

Causal influences of culture on cognition are challenging to examine scientifically. We here introduce a method to address this challenge.Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural information influences the cognitions of individuals, and (c) draw conclusions about the emergence of shared cognition. Specifically, cultural snapshots are recorded samples of public environments commonly encountered by many people. Television scenes, photographs of public spaces, magazine pages, and social media conversations are all examples of cultural snapshots. Representative sets of cultural snapshots can be coded to index the systematic patterns of information encountered by a collective (i.e., cultural patterns). These same materials can be used to experimentally manipulate those cultural patterns, allowing scientists to examine cultural influences on cognition and behavior. We here review and provide guidelines for cultural snapshots research, trace cultural snapshots to classic theories of culture, and describe how cultural snapshots balance the constraints of representative design (Brunswik, 1956) with those of causal inference. We then illustrate how this approach is used to address (a) questions of causality in cultural psychology and (b) questions of applicability in social cognition research. We conclude by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.1 | INTRODUCTION People see things, hear sounds, and smell odors and, through such perceptions, develop knowledge of the world that exists beyond their bodies. But in what sense could people literally perceive culture and thus develop knowledge about it? We suggest that culture is perceived over time in quantifiable patterns of observed behaviors, artifacts, and utterances; these cultural patterns may then influence individual humans' cognitions, including cognition about culture. Cultural patterns are necessarily embedded in the sensory chaos of daily life, and it is this embedding that makes culture perceptually rich and irreducible to conceptual description. For example, Americans who have a common racial identity may tend to behave more positively toward each other than people without a common racial identity but this statement is only a conceptual description of a cultural pattern. Real cultural patterns are instantiated Psychology, and elsewhere. With his postdoctoral mentor, Nalini Ambady, Max co-authored the nonverbal communication chapter of the most recent version of the Handbook of Social Psychology. He is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver. Sarah A. Lamer is a PhD student at the University of Denver in the social psychology program. Her primary research interest is examining if and how subtle sociocultural cues can reinforce and challenge social inequities, shape individual values, and inform lay theories. She holds a BA in Psychology from Connecticut College with an emphasis in Public Policy a...

Metacognition fosters cultural learning: Evidence from individual differences and situational prompts.

“…The interpersonal level is what most clearly distinguishes social psychology from sociology on one side and from experimental psychology on the other; nonetheless, most psychological research on culture either looks at associations between country-level variables (Schwartz, 1986) or links between different constructs at the individual level (Oyserman & Lee, 2008). Only a few research programs have identified interpersonal situations that instill and maintain the group-level tendency in an individual’s behavior, such as Kitayama and colleagues’ work on situational affordances (Kitayama et al, 1997; Morling et al, 2002) and Weisbuch and colleagues’ work on nonverbal cues (Weisbuch, Lamer, Treinen, & Pauker, 2017). Our research documents another: experiencing interactions and evaluative feedback reinforces norm-compliant behavior.…”

The thin blue waveform: Racial disparities in officer prosody undermine institutional trust in the police.

“…BWC footage can serve as a “cultural snapshot” (Weisbuch et al, 2009, 2017) for police-citizen interactions: to reveal patterns in citizen interactions (as data), their relation to perceiver-level factors in their interpretation (as stimuli), and their causal effects on institutional trust (as treatment). Sampling thin slices from traffic stops, we not only extend research on the content of officers’ communication with the public (Voigt et al, 2017), but also probe how participants’ own beliefs correspond to their perceptions of these cues, and demonstrate their consequences for police-community relations.…”

The transmission of gender stereotypes through televised patterns of nonverbal bias.

“…Following established methodology (Pauker et al, 2019; Weisbuch & Ambady, 2009; Weisbuch et al, 2009, 2016, 2017), we selected (a) a broad sample of popular shows on different TV networks with the highest viewership totals in the U.S., (b) clips from episodes that actually aired during the time period of interest, (c) characters within each show that were matched on appearance frequency, race, and age, and (d) multiple snapshots of each character. Clips were sampled in accordance with a priori rules (see below), and steps b–d were performed by hypothesis-blind experimenters.…”

“…Culture can then be understood as the private and public representations common to a collective group (Sperber, 1996). We follow Adams and Markus’s (2004) extension of this framework and for this article, define cultural patterns as specifiable public representations commonly encountered by a collective (see also Weisbuch et al, 2017). We argue that children learn intersubjective norms in part by perceiving cultural patterns, so what they learn reflects the public representations common to their local ecologies.…”