culture bias

• Universality is a theory of behaviour that applies to everyone. However, it is difficult to come up with universal theories of behaviour because of cultural differences
• Culture bias is when researchers misrepresent the differences between cultures
• Ethnocentrism is when a theory of behaviour focuses on one's own cultural perspective and assume it is correct or more important than others and seeing other cultures as abnormal
• Psychological research suffers from ethnocentric bias if it lacks validity or reliability due to ethnocentrism.
• Ethnocentric bias is a result of researchers ignoring other cultures or researchers studying other cultures without understanding their cultural perspectives.
• A consequence of ethnocentrism is that it decreases the external validity and reliability of the research because results may not generalise to other cultures. Ethnocentric standards of normal behaviour can can lead to misdiagnosis of psychological conditions because others are seen to be behaving abnormally. Also, ethnocentrism can lead to harmful stereotypes and other cultures being devalued.
• An example of ethnocentrism is Ainsworth's research on attachment. Ainsworth’s participants were middle-class American mothers, which means that the results may not generalise to different cultures, because there are cultural differences in attachment.
• An example of ethnocentric bias is Asch's 1955 conformity experiment and Milgram's 1963 obedience experiment which both only used American participants but claimed universality and assumed people from other cultures would act the same as Americans
• Cultural relativism is the idea that behaviour must be understood from the perspective of a specific culture.
• Cultural relativism prevents prejudice and discrimination, because it values all cultures equally. It assumes that no one culture is normal and it doesn’t see other cultures as abnormal
• Cultural relativism may exaggerate the differences between cultures and may lead to alpha bias. Also, cultural relativism may ignore differences within a culture, which is a form of beta bias
• Cross cultural research involves researchers from a number of different cultures, to minimise the risk of ethnocentric bias carrying out the research in different cultures to see if theories generalise or if there are cultural variations.