Cultural Diversity in Companies

ASSIGNMENT 1

1. Your new job in a culturally diverse company requires you to figure out how to deal with this cultural diversity in such a way that yields the most benefits for the company. Your two options are to take the color-blind approach or the multicultural approach. Choose one, and justify your response based on the research presented in the textbook. (Chapter 1).
2. Define the ratchet effect and generate an example for it (excluding the example of the hammer in the textbook). (Chapter 2.)

ASSIGNMENT 2

1. Justify why the cultural practice of eating seal blubber among many indigenous populations in the Arctic is both an evoked culture and a transmitted culture.
2. On Planet Belia, two civilizations (the Edinia and the Elash) have coexisted for centuries in the same environmental context. Both civilizations have marriage rituals (for this question, assume that marriage rituals can only be either monogamous or polygamous). You know that Edinians believe that polygamy is generally better than monogamy, so there are more polygamists than monogamists in Edinia. To determine whether evoked culture or transmitted culture plays a bigger role in affecting marriage rituals, you visit Edinia and Elash and try to find the proportion of marriages that are monogamous versus polygamous. Draw a bar graph of what your data would look like if evoked culture plays a bigger role than transmitted culture.
3. Your professor wants to upload a video of talking horses, and he wants it to go “viral” (i.e., spread very quickly to many people). Based on the different factors that cause ideas to spread, give examples of what the video would need to include for it to have the highest likelihood of spreading.
4. Vancouver has many different neighborhood areas, including Richmond and Strathcona. Richmond is politically more conservative, while Strathcona is politically more liberal. Create an account based on dynamic social impact theory to explain how these different neighborhoods seem to have different forms of political culture.
5. While chatting with your friend, she says that people nowadays have less intelligence than people used to. Evaluate whether this claim is true—be sure to use empirical data to address this issue.

ASSIGNMENT 3

1. Canada and the United States are two countries that, in many ways, are very similar to each other, particularly in terms of the personality trait called extraversion. A researcher wants to study whether there is a cultural difference between Canada and the United States in terms of how much the people like to socialize with friends, which is related to extraversion. From the information provided, determine what the independent variable(s) and dependent variable(s) are, write about whether you think this study is high or low in power, and justify why you would ascribe high or low power to this study.
2. Create a six-item questionnaire about “happiness” such that it counters the acquiescence bias. Also, discuss how you would analyze the data to make it less susceptible to the extremity bias.

ASSIGNMENT 4

1. You overhear a mother talking about her adolescent son being rebellious, but she does not seem bothered by his rebelliousness. Instead, she says that it is a universal phenomenon that adolescents are rebellious. Do you agree or disagree? Please justify your response with empirical evidence.
   1. Compare and contrast authoritarian parenting and authoritative parenting, making sure to include associated parental attributes.

ASSIGNMENT 5

1. Your father wants to encourage you to travel to as many places as possible and stay in each place as long as possible. It does not matter what cultures you live in—it will all benefit your creativity. Based on research on culture and creativity, do you agree with his assertions? Why or why not?
2. At the customs gate of your country’s busiest international airport, two people are arriving as landed immigrants. As an immigrant support worker, you are tasked with determining how best to allocate resources in helping different immigrants. To do that, you must first determine how successfully each person will be at acculturating. Looking at the files for the landed immigrants, you see that Grace is coming from the United States, a country that is very similar to your country. On the other hand, Cecilia is coming from Mongolia, a country that is very dissimilar to your country. Based on the concept of cultural distance, draw the expected acculturation pattern (feelings toward host culture over time) for each person, assuming that both people do acculturate. For the purpose of this question, the heterogeneity/homogeneity of the host culture is irrelevant.

ASSIGNMENT 6

1. Ariana and Misha looked at the music charts. Ariana compared herself to Adelle (Ariana thinks she is worse than Adelle), while Misha compared herself to Mariah (Misha thinks she is better than Mariah). Name and define the processes in which Ariana and Misha engaged, respectively. Then, draw a graph that shows Ariana’s and Misha’s self-esteem before and after they make their comparisons. Assume that Ariana and Misha start out with the same level of self-esteem.
2. Jessica and Jonathan are best friends. Jessica is very individualistic, while Jonathan is very collectivistic. Based on research regarding primary and secondary control, draw a graph for each person that shows the relationship between the amount of anxiety they would feel based on how much personal control they have in any given situation.

ASSIGNMENT 7

1. Given the widely different standards of attractiveness around the world, one cannot say that universal standards of attractiveness exist. True or false, and why?
2. Differentiate between how someone with high relational mobility views his or her social relationships versus someone with low relational mobility.

ASSIGNMENT 8

1. “It is valid to suggest that some cultures are morally superior to others.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Explain your conclusion by basing it on evidence from one of the moral psychological models discussed in your textbook.
2.  Create a diagram that shows how the different levels of Kohlberg’s model of moral reasoning, Shweder’s different codes of ethics, and the five different moral intuitions are related to each other.