ao3 culture

• A danger of ethnocentric research is that it can help to create or reinforce stereotypes. EG The US Army used an IQ test before WWI which was culturally biased toward the dominant white majority. Unsurprisingly, the test showed that African-Americans were at the bottom of the IQ scale and this had a negative effect on the attitudes of Americans’ toward this group of people, which highlights the negative impact that ethnocentrically biased research can have.
• • dealing with cultural bias develop ‘indigenous psychologies’: theories drawing explicitly on the particular experiences of people in different cultural contexts. 
  • Afrocentrism, a movement, roots in Africa, theories must recognise the African context of behaviours and attitudes.
  • emic approach, uniqueness of every culture and behaviour from the inside of cultural system. 
  • This matters, emergence of theories more relevant to the lives and cultures of people not only in Africa, but also to those far removed from their African origins, development= strength of cultural relativism, 
• • research is biased=biased views of culture
  • Smith and Bond found, in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social psychology,
  • that 66% of the studies were American,
  • 32% European,
  • and only 2% from the rest of the world.
  • This suggests that much psychological research is severely unrepresentative and need to be greatly improved by simply selecting different cultural groups to study.