The cultural lens

The lens in brief

Cultural psychology studies how culture and mind shape each other. Culture here means the shared practices, beliefs, values, tools and ways of raising children that a group passes on. Cultural psychologists such as Richard Shweder, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama argue that many "basic" psychological processes look different in different cultures. Barbara Rogoff, building on the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, studies how children learn by taking part in the activities of their community.

The cultural lens asks two questions of any study: what did the culture of the participants contribute, and would the result look the same elsewhere?

How this lens reads the study

The mechanism probably travels. Learning by watching is found in every human society that has been studied. In fact, Rogoff and her colleagues describe many communities, including Indigenous communities in the Americas, where children are expected to learn mainly by observing adults and joining in, with little direct teaching. They call this learning by observing and pitching in. So the cultural lens would not doubt that children everywhere learn from models. In some places observational learning may be even more central than in a 1960s American nursery.

But what children copy depends on culture. Three things in the study were cultural, not universal:

1. Which models matter. The study used unfamiliar adults. In many families, children spend their days with grandparents, aunts, older siblings and cousins. Older children are often the most-watched models. Status also differs: in some cultures a stranger would carry little authority, while an elder would carry a great deal.
2. What counts as aggression, and when it is allowed. Rough play, play-fighting and teasing are encouraged in some communities and punished in others. Whether a child sees hitting a toy as naughty, as a game or as practice for being strong depends on what the child has been taught.
3. Gender roles. The paper treats aggression as "masculine-typed", a description of American norms in the 1950s. Cross-cultural research finds that boys are more physically aggressive in most societies, but the size of the gap varies. Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Edwards (1973), comparing children in several cultures, concluded that the behaviours typical of boys and girls "seem malleable under the impact of socialization pressures", such as the tasks each culture gives to each sex.

The objects were cultural too. An inflatable clown punching toy, toy dart guns and a tetherball were familiar American consumer toys. A child who had never seen a clown, a punching toy or a toy gun would read the room differently. Even the "non-aggressive" toys, a tea set and farm animals, carry cultural meanings about play.

What this lens values in the study

It shows how culture is passed on. A culture survives because children copy the people around them, and the Bobo study demonstrates one way that happens. The cultural lens also values the children's comments about "ladies", which show cultural norms at work inside the experiment.

What it would question

• One culture, presented as universal. All 72 children came from one university nursery in California. The results were taught worldwide as facts about "children".
• Missing context. The study removed the family, community and meaning that normally surround a child's behaviour.
• Fixed gender. It treated one society's gender roles as natural.

Evidence from this tradition

Learning by observing, in an Indian village. The Six Cultures Study, led by Beatrice and John Whiting, sent researchers in the 1950s to observe child-rearing in Kenya, India, Mexico, Okinawa, the Philippines and the United States. The Indian team, Leigh Minturn and John Hitchcock, found that Rajput parents in Khalapur, Uttar Pradesh, believed young children learn mainly by watching and imitating, and that aggression towards adults was treated far more seriously than aggression between children. The India page quotes their report. This is one community of one caste at one time, so it does not describe "Indian children" in general.

Television violence in different societies. L. Rowell Huesmann and Leonard Eron (1986) led a study of television violence and children's aggression in the United States, Finland, Poland, Australia and Israel. In Israel, children in cities who watched more violent television were more aggressive, but children raised on a kibbutz, a collective farming community, showed no such link. Huesmann and Bachrach (1986) explained this through kibbutz life: strong group rules against aggression, little television, and viewing together with adults and peers who commented on what they saw. A Dutch study in the same research family also found no link once children's earlier aggression and intelligence were taken into account (Wiegman, Kuttschreuter & Baarda, 1992).

Communities pass on their level of violence. Douglas Fry (1988) observed children aged three to eight in two Zapotec communities in Mexico, one with much more adult violence than the other. Children in the more violent community fought and play-fought more. Fry concluded that children learn their community's patterns of aggression. This is social learning at the scale of a whole community, which the Bobo study, with one adult and one child, could not show.

A study this lens would design

1. Run the study in several communities, chosen for real differences in child-rearing rather than nationality alone.
2. Before designing, spend time in each community to learn which models children watch, what play-fighting means there, and which toys are familiar. This is ethnography: long-term observation inside a community.
3. Use locally meaningful models, such as an older cousin or a respected elder, and locally familiar objects.
4. Ask parents and children what they consider aggression.
5. Compare how much children copy, whom they copy, and why.

Try this

A researcher repeats the study in a village where children rarely meet adult strangers and mostly play in mixed-age groups led by older children. Almost no child copies the unknown adult model. When the model is a respected 10-year-old from the village, copying rises sharply.

Does this disprove Bandura's finding? Explain using the cultural lens.

Show the reasoning

No. It supports the mechanism, observational learning, and shows that its effects depend on culture. Children copied when the model was someone their community gives status to, an older child. They did not copy an unknown adult, perhaps because strangers carry little authority there.

The original study assumed that any adult is a powerful model. That may be true for children raised in settings where adult teachers and strangers are in charge, as in an American university nursery. The cultural lens says the rule "children copy models" holds, but who counts as a model is learned from culture. (This village is an invented example.)