CULTURE AFFECTS BEHAVIOR
Ideas in this map about how culture shapes individual behavior develop
along four interrelated strands of benchmarks about groups and subcultures,
cultural influences, learning from others, and rewards and punishment.
How associations with groups or subcultures can affect an individual's
behavior is an important part of this map, but this map does not cover
how groups themselves behave, a topic which will be mapped in the next
edition of Atlas.
Notes
The K-2 benchmark "People are alike in many ways..." contributes to several
of the strands on this map and does not belong to any one strand. This same
benchmark also contributes to several of the strands on the Heredity
and Experience Shape Behavior map, and appears in the Mental
Health cluster (in Chapter 6).
The 3-5 benchmark "Human beings tend to repeat..." also plays an important
role in the Heredity and Experience Shape Behavior
map, where it is part of a strand on how beliefs, biases, and expectations
affect perception.
In the cultural influences strand, the 3-5 benchmark
"Each culture has distinct patterns..." and the 6-8 benchmark "What is considered
to be acceptable behavior..." are in reverse order compared to their grade-level
placement in Benchmarks. This change was made on the grounds that the
idea that cultures have distinctive patterns of behavior should precede ideas
about variations in those patterns over time and the existence of some invariant
components.
| Research in Benchmarks
Although lower elementary-school children do not have the capacity
to see social conventions from another point of view, they can
learn about and enjoy many concrete manifestations of cultural
diversity (Ramsey, 1986).
Research also suggests that students under the age of ten may be
more receptive than older students to learning about other people
and more likely to develop a positive outlook toward people from
other cultures and homelands (Stone, 1986).
Research into student thinking about people from the past indicates
that students do not realize that values, beliefs, and attitudes
may differ from culture to culture or that people from other cultures
have different ideas because their situations are different. Before
students can reason about different world views, they often have
to abandon the belief that some human cultures are biologically
subordinate (Shelmit, 1984).
Another complication is that students tend to impose contemporary
values and ideas from their own culture upon other cultures (Shelmit,
1984).
As children try to understand biological and social phenomena,
they often overgeneralize information about racial and cultural
differences. One must be cautious, however, not to assume that
children are prejudiced or deliberately using stereotypes when
they overgeneralize. They may simply be thinking typically for
young children trying to make sense out of their limited experience
with other groups (Ramsey, 1986). Research indicates that stereotypic
attitudes begin to develop about 7th grade (Stone, 1986). |
