![]() Instinct prompts many dogs to turn around before they lie down, and it prompts most dogs to defend their territory. Different breeds of dogs do have different personalities, but even these stem from the biological differences among breeds passed down from one generation to another. A dog chases any squirrel it sees because of instinct, and a cat chases a mouse for the same reason. These and other animals are governed largely by biological instincts that control them totally. But humans are much less under the control of biology than any other animal species, including other primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees. As just one example, humans have a biological need to eat, and so they do. This is not to say that biology is entirely unimportant. These examples suggest that human behavior is more the result of culture than it is of biology. We attribute these changes to alcohol’s biological effect as a drug on our central nervous system, and scientists have documented how alcohol breaks down in our body to achieve this effect. Most typically, their inhibitions lower and they become loud, boisterous, and even rowdy. In the United States, when people drink too much alcohol, they become intoxicated and their behavior changes. The example of drunkenness further illustrates how cultural expectations influence a behavior that is commonly thought to have biological causes. Unfortunately for them, the perceptions they learn from their culture are real in their consequences. These men learn how they should feel as budding fathers, and thus they feel this way. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1928) once pointed out, if things are perceived as real, then they are real in their consequences. Perhaps their minds are playing tricks on them, but that is often the point of culture. And because they should feel these symptoms, they actually do so. Yet the men feel them nonetheless, because they have learned from their culture that they should feel these types of discomfort (Doja, 2005). ![]() The term couvade refers to these symptoms, which do not have any known biological origin. They are nauseous during their wives’ pregnancies, and they experience labor pains while their wives give birth. These men are neither carrying nor delivering a baby, and there is no logical-that is, biological-reason for them to suffer either type of discomfort.Īnd yet scholars have discovered several traditional societies in which men about to become fathers experience precisely these symptoms. But we would be surprised if the husbands of pregnant women woke up sick in the morning or experienced severe abdominal pain while their wives gave birth. These two types of discomfort have known biological causes, and we are not surprised that so many pregnant women experience them. Consider morning sickness and labor pains, both very familiar to pregnant women before and during childbirth, respectively. The profound impact of culture becomes most evident when we examine behaviors or conditions that, like kissing, are normally considered biological in nature. Without culture, we could not have a society. Culture influences not only language but the gestures we use when we interact, how far apart we stand from each other when we talk, and the values we consider most important for our children to learn, to name just a few. ![]() Someone who grows up in the United States differs in many ways, some of them obvious and some of them not so obvious, from someone growing up in China, Sweden, South Korea, Peru, or Nigeria. ![]() If the culture we learn influences our beliefs and behaviors, then culture is a key concept to the sociological perspective. Because society, as defined in Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective”, refers to a group of people who live in a defined territory and who share a culture, it is obvious that culture is a critical component of any society. Instead, kissing seems best understood as something we learn to enjoy from our culture, or the symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artifacts (material objects) that are part of a society. Explain why sociologists might favor cultural explanations of behavior over biological explanations.Īs this evidence on kissing suggests, what seems to us a very natural, even instinctual act turns out not to be so natural and biological after all.Describe examples of how culture influences behavior.
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