Psychology: Concepts and Applications 3e   Halonen
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Learning About Other Cultures

Learning a foreign language is a daunting task. Not only do students have to learn dozens of new words and sentence structures, they also have to learn about another culture. A reading selection about "A Day at Home" in a Norwegian textbook, for example, will describe completely different activities from a textbook on Swahili.

An Israeli researcher suspected that students might have an easier time if they did not have to learn both subjects at once (Abu-Rubia,1996). Abu-Rubia looked at two groups of Israeli high-school students: Jewish Hebrew speakers learning Arabic, and Arabs learning Hebrew. Students read two different stories in the foreign language they were learning, one about their own culture, and the other about the culture they were studying. Both the Jewish and Arab students had much higher reading comprehension scores when they read about their own culture than the foreign culture, even though both stories were written in a foreign language. When the passages described things that were already familiar, the students did not have to learn two topics at once, and could focus on understanding the language.

Culture and Marriage Partners

How do we choose our mates? Some psychologists say that biology makes men prefer young women who can reproduce, while women pick men who will help them gain wealth and raise children. On the other hand, social learning theorists claim that people pick spouses on the basis of costs and benefits. In societies in which women have low social status, little education, and are paid less than men, women are forced to look for men who will support them. In societies in which women and men are equal, they argue, both genders will have similar preferences.

Hatfield and Sprecher (1995) tested this idea by asking college students in the United States, Russia, and Japan to rate which characteristics are important in a mate. They found that across all three cultures, men rated physical attractiveness higher than women did, while women rated traits like potential for success and kindness as more important than men did, supporting the biologists’ view. However, the gap between men’s and women’s ratings was much larger for Japanese students than either Russians or Americans, possibly because Japanese women are strongly discouraged from working after marriage and must depend on their husbands. As with most behaviors, both biology and culture have a role in selecting a spouse.

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