“Being Weird: How Culture Shapes The Mind,” By Ethan Watters,

As a young man entering my senior year of high school, my mind races as I try to figure out what it is that I’ll commit my life to. What will be the driving passion, the purpose of my existence, the reason I get out of bed every morning to face another day of this life? Some people would try to encourage me to choose a career simply for its potential to make me wealthy. However, looking at the degenerate lives of the rich and the famous around the world, its apparent to me that the pursuit of earthly riches alone isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I’d rather spend my days in pursuit of something more fulfilling. As far as I can tell from my

When I graduated high school I had no idea what I wanted to do, all I knew is I was done with public school and could live my life as what I thought an adult was. My father and most of my family believed it was important for me to go to college, and get a kick start with my life. Though they weren’t wrong, I had no idea what I wanted to do and no discipline to do my studies to the full extent of my abilities.

Have you thought of someone’s culture as weird? Have you thought that you are completely different from them? If so, what prompts us to make that assumption. Culture is a very good reason for this. So, to what extent does one’s culture inform the way one views others and the world? Culture informs a person on the way others are and the world.

Culture plays a paramount role in our lives. “It is what shapes who we are and how we view the world” (Thorp & Sanchez, 1998,

From a very early age, I always assumed it was a part of my future to pursue an education. The American educational system engraves the importance of school at a very young age. Elementary school children are motivated through rewards when they try their hardest to reach their goals. Students are exposed to statistics and facts outlining the consequences of not getting a college degree as soon as they reach middle school. High school counselors and staff make it their priority to ensure that students apply to college. Students are conditioned to believe that education is the building block to a successful future. My cultural upbringing did not support my choice to pursue an education, however, I refused to conform to my family’s behavioral expectations because certain norms must be challenged due to progressive time periods and conflicting values.

The culture in which we were raised in has a big impact on who we are and how we behave. Our culture effects things such as how we dress, the way we interact with others, and our manners such as what we may or may not find funny or what we may find offensive or weird. In the Ethan Watters Article “Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind” we see examples of how being raised in different cultures affects our decisions and the way we perceive things. For example, in the ultimatum game (which is played by giving the first player $100 dollars, he can then offer player 2 any amount of the $100 but if the second player rejects the money they both end up with nothing) we can see how differently Machiguengans and Americans were likely to play. We

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

According to cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In other words, culture is a concept that social organizations practice in order to explain certain phenomena in nature whether through mythology, rituals, art, music, and language. However, as explained by Ethan Watters in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan,” culture is not permanent, since it has the ability, and more than ever in the present society, to “move across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation” (Watters 519). In addition, as demonstrated by Oliver Sacks in the articled called “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” it is a mistake to think that individuals are bound to behave in a way that culture told them to behave. Instead, individuals are free to create his or her own unique experience of interpreting the world. We might consider the “reality” that we live in to be fiction to the extent that we are willing to use different faculties and analyze what we are witnessing; this gives us the power, as individuals, to think and search for each of us’s unique interpretation of reality. .

We need to know our formula, what we want to get. There are formulas for cylinder, volume is equal to pi times the radius squared times the height. You might want to get a pyramid’s volume, and you use a different formula to get it, a third times the base times height. These are all great things to learn, but what’s the formula for life? Do you want to succeed, go to college, have a family, live in your parent’s basement for the rest of your life? Let’s say you want to live in your parent’s basement gaming for the rest of your life. You next have to substitute ways to achieve that. This situation has a simpler formula, you need to live there, have a food supply and video games, and nothing else. But when we simplify this, is this really what we want to do with our lives, by just throwing it away? The teachers at this school and especially my parents have shown me by their examples is to lead a happy life, you need to expand your education. I want to go to college so that I can get a job to support a family and because of the complexity of it, the formula for this situation is a tad more touchy. Getting to college is a nice thought, but I need to substitute ways so I can get there. Maybe I put in some AP classes in high school for expanded knowledge and college credits. Involvement will also make me more appealing to colleges. Now that I

In my early childhood years I grew up very poor; eating mostly beans, cornbread, and ramen. I grew up seeing how a lower education can affect your life and your children, that why from a young age I knew I wanted a stable future where I knew my children would be able to have a happy life. And with that goal I knew I would either have to get a higher education, somehow land a well paying job early on, or serve in the military. With the beginning of high school I lost sight of my goal not really thinking

For the purposes of this piece, culture is defined as “the full range of human patterned experience” as described by Cole (1996) cited in Gla ̆veanu & Jovchelovitch (2017, p.113). This chapter also provides a description of the importance culture plays in psychological research.

When I was a little girl my friends and I always talked about what we were going to be when we grew up. Some said a teacher; others said a nurse, secretary, and even a mom. I knew what I was going to be, but what we don't think about is how we get to be these things. We float through elementary school, having small children fun. Next we go to middle school trying to find our ways in the world, some of us worries about grades, and some don't. Not many thinking ahead of high school, let alone college. In high school we soon realize that grades are very important and better grades give you a better chance at better colleges. So those of us who want to go to college start cramping down on our studies so we can get those desirable grades. I may have not been the perfect student throughout high school. My Study habits could have been better, but one thing I do know is that I want to do more with my life than just a high school diploma.

In today’s society, an individual who is a member of the dominant privileged societal assembly is not always discussed because the personal identity is taken as a guarantee due to the dominant culture. Nevertheless, culture affects the members of society because of the association with the dominant culture we become a different category consequently which leads to being treated and viewed differently (Tatum, 2000.) “Culture creates a person” (Vognar, 2012). In my opinion, culture influences how we represent ourselves; starting with how we communicate, behave, body gestures and postures. This can affect us psychologically. “Culture shapes us, but many events mold culture and we shape these just as much”. By virtue of unconsciously of us behaving in a way that we feel is culturally appropriate according to how we were raised from our early childhood years to our teenage

Human beings develop beliefs of the world based on their interpretations of observations and experiences, actively preserving, interpreting, and producing meaning within their own social world. The physical embodiment of cultural capital has become a substantial, if not the primary educational force, in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that define our understanding of self, the foundation of social life, and dictates one’s position within the social order. Repeated exposure to socializing agents within a family normalizes certain dynamics and renders others invisible in the process, a cycle of cultural relativism that resounds with elders who have received the same lessons since childhood. Pierre Bourdieu,

The argument is that structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures and these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions. The element of culture must be understood in term of their relationship. The structure