The boring version: So cultures differ, eh? And some are the same? How so? (yawn)
The interesting version: You are an alien from Omicron Persei 8 called Lrrr. You want to invade Earth by blending into “Earth culture;” but as you monitor the Earthlings from a distance, you notice a lot of things that you do not 
understand, prompting you to ask:
- “Why do some people insist on staying with their parents for such a long time, while others don’t?”
- “Why do some people insist on choosing a mate? That takes so much work and effort!”
- “How is there such diversity across the small planet, but everyone is the same back home on the big planet of Omicron Persei 8?” and
- “Seriously. WTF is this class about?”
If you didn’t ask these questions, that just means you’re not an alien from Omicron Persei 8 called Lrrr, or you haven’t thought this much about culture before; but by the end of this course, you will be asking those questions!
The purpose of this course is to help you gain an appreciation for the numerous ways in which culture surrounds us, is in the air, and can have real impact on our psychology and behaviours. We will equip you with the frameworks and theories with which you can understand the world of culture that surrounds you in a more scientific manner. As part of this learning process, this course will help you learn how to read and critique the primary sources of this field – journal articles in cultural psychology.
When this course ends, students successfully meeting the course requirements will be able to:
- Identify and explain the ways in which various cultures are different/similar to each other
- Apply cultural psychological theories to explain and understand real-world issues
- Compare and contrast how cultural psychology is different from, similar to, and contributes to, other related fields of studies
- Use appropriate resources to locate empirical journal articles
- Understand and critically analyse published empirical journal articles
Use of the image on this page is permitted under the Creative Commons CC0 license