prejudice against individual due to ignoring their culture; ignoring cultural differences
Etic research is not automatically bad. The point of much of psychology is to uncover universal (nomothetic) laws of human behaviour. And given that all humans in all cultures have very similar biology, there are likely to be many universal psychological truths. But if researchers assume their culture is the default (imposed etic), that’s where the bias comes in.
Psychological research can avoid cultural bias by being conscious of cultural relativism, i.e. differences between cultures.
