IIFT 2021 Slot 1 Question Paper (23rd Dec)

Read the passage and answer the questions.
Passage

How is it that people come to use certain nonverbal behaviours in specific settings, or associate a particularbehaviour (e.g., smiling) with a particular meaning (e.g., happiness)? A sociocultural approach toanswering these questions focuses on the ways in which behaviours and their meanings are prescribed atsocial or cultural levels and on the ways in which people come to acquire them. Encompassing a number ofmodels and theories, the sociocultural paradigm emphasizes the influence of human interaction in creatingand transmitting understanding; thus, it highlights the effects of culture, class, religion, sexuality, power, orother socially maintained factors on the enactment and meaning of behaviour.

The fundamental assumption underlying the sociocultural paradigm is that interpersonal behaviour and itsmeanings are learned through the diffusion of social or cultural knowledge and are, therefore, malleable.Because interpersonal behaviours are learned rather than innate, both behaviours and their meanings canbe altered by changing the knowledge that is conveyed. This can explain, for instance, not only whycultures vary one from another in both their behaviours and the meanings of those behaviours, but alsowhy, without access to another culture’s knowledge, people often find cross-cultural communication sochallenging.

Central to the sociocultural paradigm, then, are two ideas: i) Most nonverbal communication is learned,rather than innate, and, ii) Most non-verbal behaviours do not have inherent meanings, but rather, theirmeanings are products of social consensus. These principles have found widespread acceptance within thefield of human communication, perhaps, in part, because of their considerable intuitive appeal. It is easy toidentify examples of behavioural learning simply by considering the apparent influence of parents,teachers, gender roles, cultural norms, and the media on children’s behaviours. Consequently, theparadigm seems to have face validity as an approach that is isomorphic with people’s everydayexperiences.

A related strength of the sociocultural paradigm is found in the magnitude of the empirical evidence thathas been marshalled in support of it. Perhaps as a result of its intuitive appeal, many researchers haveapplied the tenets of the paradigm to their own work and have found support for the influence of learning,or for the social embeddedness of meaning, across a wide range of topics, ranging from personalitydevelopment and child discipline, to gender role acquisition, doctor-patient communication, and therelational messages of nonverbal behaviours.

One potential criticism of the sociocultural paradigm is that its emphasis on the social influences onlearning behaviour and creating meaning obscures what may be substantial non-social influences on thesame outcomes, including the influence of genetics. Certainly, any paradigm will lead its proponents toattend to particular variables more than others; the problem lies in the potential to misinterpret geneticeffects, for instance, as the effects of learning or socialization. An important example derives from thestudy of parental influence on child personality development. As Harris (1998) noted in her detailed review,there is no shortage of social science research showing that children are more likely than not to grow upwith personalities similar to those of their parents. That is, pleasant, affectionate parents tend to rearpleasant, affectionate children, whereas aggressive, violent parents tend to rear children who are likewiseaggressive and violent. Working from the framework of the sociocultural paradigm, one would find littledifficulty explaining these robust patterns as products of socialization: children observe their parentsbehaving in a pleasant, affectionate manner and come to adopt the same disposition themselves. However,as Harris (1995) pointed out, much of the research examining parental-offspring congruence in dispositionhas failed to control for an important alternative hypothesis: children are similar to their parents because oftheir genetic relatedness to the parents, not because of how they were socialized. To the extent thatresearchers in this area have failed to entertain (and, consequently, to control for) such an alternative, therefore, they may run the risk of misattributing—or at least, overattributing—the observed similaritybetween parents and children to a social influence, when a non-social influence is also operative.

Read the following passage:

The ùber philosopher Bertrand Russell presents a particularly toxic variant of my surprise jolt in hisillustration of what people in his line of business call the Problem of Induction or Problem of InductiveKnowledge—certainly the mother of all problems in life.

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is thegeneral rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its bestinterests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

What can a turkey learn about what is in store for it tomorrow from the events of yesterday? A lot,perhaps, but certainly a little less than it thinks, and it is just that "little less" that may make all thedifference. The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds youcan be the one that wrings your neck.

Let us go one step further and consider induction's most worrisome aspect: learning backward. Considerthat the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation,as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Itsconfidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though theslaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when therisk was at the highest! But the problem is even more general than that; it strikes at the nature ofempirical knowledge itself. Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does,and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

FIGURE 1: ONE THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS OF HISTORY

A turkey before and after Thanksgiving.

It would appear to a quoting dilettante—i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts withphrases from some dead authority—that, as phrased by Hobbes, "from like antecedents flow likeconsequents." Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearlof wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship's captain:
But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident. . . of any sort worth speaking about. I haveseen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wreckednor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
E. J . Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS
Titanic
Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.

For the following questions answer them individually