culture

n. Three anthropologists defined culture as follows: Culture is to society what memory is to individuals (Kluckhohn). Culture is the human-made part of the environment (Herskovits). Culture is shared understandings made manifest in act and artifact (Redfield). Most recent thinking is especially supportive of Redfield,s definition. In contemporary psychology, culture refers to a network of loosely interconnected knowledge items produced, reproduced, and updated by a collection of interdependent individuals. An item in the network may refer to a certain declarative knowledge (know what: e.g., beliefs about the relationship between the self and the society, social norms) or a certain procedural knowledge (know how: e.g., thinking styles). Culture is developed and reproduced to address complex coordination problems in the society and to meet individuals’ psychological needs (such as the needs for meanings of life, social belongingness, and epistemic certainty). Culture is encoded in social institutions (e.g., the legal institutions), is transmitted across space and generations through various external media, and evolves in response to the changing social ecology.

-CYC