If you ask your students what ‘culture’ means, you will likely get responses relating to food, festivals, and flags. And languages. Those things are not wrong, but they barely scratch the surface of what we mean when we talk about culture as a determinant of behaviour. For IB Psychology purposes, culture is best understood as the shared set of values, beliefs, norms, and practices transmitted across generations within a social group that shapes how its members think, feel, and behave and through which individuals come to understand who they are, what is important, and how to behave. Culture is not decoration on top of a universal human psychology; it is, in significant ways, constitutive of psychology.
Culture is the shared set of values, beliefs, norms, and practices transmitted across generations within a social group that shapes how its members think, feel, and behave.
How culture shapes behaviour
The simplest way to understand culture’s effect on behaviour is through the individualism–collectivism dimension. Individualistic cultures, prevalent in Western Europe and North America, prioritise personal goals, autonomous self-expression, and individual achievement. Collectivistic cultures, prevalent across East and South Asia, the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, prioritise group harmony, obligations and responsibilities, and collective identity. These are not merely different surface preferences; they generate objectively different cognitive styles, emotional profiles, and behavioural patterns.
Consider self-enhancement, which is the tendency to evaluate oneself positively. It is one of the most robust findings in Western social psychology, so robust that some researchers once proposed it was a universal human motivator, but cross-cultural research refuted this claim: East Asian participants show significantly less self-enhancement than Western participants, and in many cases show self-criticism that Western frameworks would classify as negative behaviour, but which, in collectivistic cultural contexts, reflects the socially adaptive motive to improve the self for the benefit of the group. The same behaviour has opposite meaning in different cultures. This is why culture matters for psychology: it does not merely add content to universal processes; it shapes the processes themselves.
Culture also shapes how children learn as demonstrated by a study from rural Samoa:
Odden and Rochat (1999): Learning by watching
In 1999, Heather Odden and Philippe Rochat conducted a longitudinal, overt observational study in a rural Samoan village that provides a vivid illustration of how cultural context shapes learning through observation. The researchers were interested in how Samoan children acquire the complex knowledge and skills of their community such as weaving, fishing, food preparation, and ceremonial practices, given that explicit teaching, in the Western sense, is relatively rare in traditional Samoan village life.
The study found that Samoan children learned predominantly through keen, sustained observation of adult community members going about their everyday activities. Children would watch quietly and attentively from the periphery, sometimes for extended periods, before attempting to replicate observed behaviours. Crucially, this was not passive watching; it was purposeful, concentrated, and socially sanctioned. The cultural norm in the village supported what Odden and Rochat termed ‘intent community participation’. The children were included in community life as legitimate, observing participants, before they were capable of full participation.
This contrasts with the Western educational norm: learning is usually structured as explicit verbal transmission from teacher to student in a dedicated instructional setting, and where watching without doing is often treated as insufficient engagement. In the Samoan village, the community itself was the classroom, adult practice was the curriculum, and attentive observation was the primary pedagogy.
Odden and Rochat (1999) supports Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, specifically its core claim that observational learning is a primary mechanism of human behavioural acquisition. But it extends Bandura’s laboratory findings into a rich naturalistic cultural context, showing that the conditions under which observational learning is most effective are themselves culturally structured. The Samoan children were not simply watching by accident; they were participating in a culturally organised system of knowledge transmission in which observation was valued, modelled by older children, and embedded in genuine community practice.
The classroom implication
For DP Psychology teachers, Odden and Rochat (1999) is useful on several levels. It provides a real-world illustration of observational learning outside the laboratory. It demonstrates that what counts as ‘learning’ and what constitutes a good ‘learner’, is culturally defined. And it challenges students to examine the cultural assumptions embedded in their own educational experience: the emphasis on verbal explanation, individual assessment, and explicit instruction that characterises Western schooling is not a universal delivery mechanism for human learning; it is one culturally specific solution to the universal challenge of transmitting knowledge across generations.
NOTE: Research studies are still relevant for teaching IBDP Psychology, but they are NOT required to be used in any exam questions/exam responses.
