Understanding Culture

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about understanding the role of culture in psychological research, focusing in particular on: (i) a novel example study demonstrating the power of differing object exposure on perception and expectation, contextualised in the differing shapes of a typical window around the world; (ii) further examples of cultural differences, including conversational volume, hand gestures when speaking, and buyer-seller interactions online; (iii) definitions of culture and cross-cultural psychology to be used throughout this course; (iv) the prevalence of WEIRD culture research and the problems with applying findings from these studies to the whole world’s population.

About the lecturer

Dr Ayoub Bouguettaya is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Dr Bouguettaya’s research interests are in social psychology and how knowledge from that field can be applied to others, particularly health, including how we can apply social identity theory to societal problems, as well as investigating the different perspectives one might take on those issues. Some of Dr Bouguettaya’s recent publications include 'The relationship between gambling advertising and gambling attitudes, intentions and behaviours: a critical and meta-analytic review' (2020) and 'The Effect of a Food Addiction Explanation Model for Weight Control and Obesity on Weight Stigma' (2020).