Culture Bias

• Culture bias


  A tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena/behaviour through the lens of one's own culture
• Ethnocentrism


  Where our culture is seen as norm and we judge other cultures against ours

  
  

  Ainsworth's strange situation was developed to assess attachment types - this research has been applied worldwide, although it only assessed American children. for example, Van Izjendoorn and Kroonenberg carried out a meta-analysis of this study in countries worldwide (e.g., Germany, Japan)
• Cultural relativism


  The idea that behaviour can only be truly understood if cultural contest is taken into consideration
• 3 approaches/etic to combat culture bias


  1. Emic approach
  2. Etic approach
  3. Imposed
• Emic approach


  Studying individual cultures and behaviours that are actually specific
• Etic approach


  Studying behaviour across many cultures in order to find universal human behaviour
• Imposed etic


  When a psychological test/rm/theory that was developed for one culture is imposed on other groups of people
• Evaluation of culture


  • Perpetuates stereotypes (IQ tests)
  • Ethnocentrism (western behaviour = norm)
  • Cultural psychology + emic approaches
  • Reflexivity
• 4 types of culture bias


  • theoretical bias
  • reporting bias
  • researcher bias
  • methodological bias
• A03 culture bias - ethnic stereotyping (consequences)


  America developed the IQ test and implemented it on non-western cultures. People who did badly on the tests were "disproportionately poor or people of colour". As a result, the US supreme court legalised forced sterilisation of citizens (over 65,000 sterilisations)

  • Negative consequences towards society
• A03 culture bias - issues conducting cross-cultural research (implication)


  it is difficult to produce cross-cultural research as the operationalisation of variables need to be the same in all cultures studied, otherwise the validity of the research can be questioned - this is the problem of imposed etic

  • leads to cultural biased conclusions
• A03 culture bias - recognition (prevention)


  to reduce culture bias, it needs to be recognised more. Smith & Bond found in their survey on social psychology that 66% of research was American, 32% was European and only 2% was the rest of the world

  • Suggests that a majority of psychological research in unrepresentative and lacks universality