Culture Bias

• Cultural Bias

  The tendency to judge behaviour in terms of the values and beliefs of your own society and culture
• Ethnocentrism 


  Judging other cultures by the standards and values of your own culture. It is the belief in the superiority of one's own culture which may lead to prejudice and discrimination of other cultures
• Cultural Relativism


  Refers to the idea that a behaviour can only be properly understood in the context of the norms and values of the culture in which it occurs
• Universality and culture bias

  • Universality refers to behaviour being applied to everyone
  • Research finds that 68% of PPs come from USA and 96% come from industrialised nations
  • People outside of this sample their behaviour then can be seen as abnormal
  • Behaviours cannot be universally applied if research is not having PPs from a variety of places
• Ethnocentrism example

  • The strange situation is an example where the norms and values in the USA were seen as the standard
  • There was also an ideal attachment type with the others being seen as abnormal
  • Child rearing that were outside of the American norm were misinterpreted such as Japanese babies that were insecurely attached
• Etic Approach


  Looks at behaviour outside of a given culture and attempts to describe these behaviours as universal
• Emic Approach


  Functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviour that are specific to that culture
• Cultural relativism

  • Imposed etic occurs where one culture is taken as the standard to compare all the other cultures
  • Suggests the behaviours will be universal which is not the case
  • Researchers should be careful of this and not have a set standard from one culture only
• AO3 Cultural Bias: Classic Studies have culture bias

  • Many influential studies are culturally biased
  • Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo all had USA samples
  • Asch's experiments in collectivist cultures found significant higher rates of conformity compared to original sample that was individualist
  • Should only be applied to individualistic cultures only
• AO3 Culture Bias: Cultural Psychology

  • The study of how people are shaped by their cultural experience
  • Incorporates work from researchers from other disciples such as sociology and political science
  • Strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research inside a culture
  • Researchers are mindful of culture bias and are aiming to prevent it
• AO3 Culture Bias: Ethnic Stereotyping

  • The US Army IQ test lead to prejudice which was used before the outbreak of the First World War.
  • The test results showed European immigrants and African-Americans doing poor
  • Many items on the test were ethnocentric such as knowing the names of the US presidents
  • Ethnic minorities were deemed 'mentally unfit' and were denied educational opportunities
• AO3 Culture Bias: Use samples from many cultural groups

  • One way to tackle cultural bias is using studies with samples from different cultural groups
  • 82% of studies used undergraduates with 51% being American psychology student
  • An American student was calculated to be 4000 times more likely to be a PP in a psychology study than a random non westerner
  • A significant amount of psychology is based on middle class, academic young adults who are often male
  • Makes psychological findings not only unrepresentative on a global scale but also within Western culture