Can you explain what sociocultural factors are and why they’re important?
A. Sociocultural factors are any type of influence on behavior that comes from the greater social environment in which people are embedded. Those include social, economic and cultural institutions. Culture is a system of meaning that a group imposes on itself and uses to set itself apart from other groups. These cultural systems are manifest in values and beliefs about the world, and also regulate behavior by setting a set of norms. These norms we have about how to behave certainly influence how we ultimately behave by setting up a system of rewards and punishments for acting in certain ways. Q. Given that culture is so ingrained in people, how do you teach them to learn and understand what drives another culture’s behavior? A. It’s very easy to see, when you’re on the outside, that another culture has cultural behaviors that are different from your own. It’s much more difficult to see that what you hold dear to you and what you know to be true about the world is culturally relative. I
