Evaluation

• Culture bias can result in prejudice against groups of people


  -Gould explained how the first intelligence tests led to social polices in the US. IQ test was given to 1.75 million army recruits and may of the items were ethnocentric e.g assuming everyone would know names of US presidents.

  -Recruits from south-east Europe and African Americans received the lowest scores.

  -The poor performance was not taken as a sign of the tests inadequacy but used to inform racist policies.

  -IQ tests were deemed 'mentally unfit' and 'feeble minded' and were denied education and professional opportunities.
• Many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally biased

  -Cultural bias is a feature of studies in social influence. e.g. Asch and Milgram only used US PP which were W.E.I.R.D people.

  -Replications of these studies in different countries produced rather than different results.

  -Asch's experiment in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the US.

  -However, nowadays individualistic-collectivist distinction doesn't apply
• Cultural psychology

  -An awareness of culture bias has resulted in the emergence of cultural psychology.

  -It incorporates work from researchers in other disciplines.

  -It strives to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture.

  -Cross-cultural research tends to focus on just two cultures instead of larger scale studies with maybe 8 countries. This suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the danger of culture bias and are taking steps to avoid it.
• Cross-cultural studies may have useful applications challenging cultural stereotypes


  -helps challenge existing preconceptions about certain cultures.

  -e.g. cultural bias in diagnosis of schizophrinea as African-Americans are more likely to be diagnosed than white American's. But SZ rates in Africa and Caribbean are not very high which suggests there is no underlying genetic vulnerability. It suggests the validity of diagnosis is poor as have poor understanding of black patients from white heath practitioners.
• Cultural relativism vs universality

  -Appreciating cultural relativism is essential for avoiding culture bias as is taking emic approach when conducting research.

  -However, it should noy be assumed that all behaviour is culturally relative. Some aspects of attachment are culturally relative but some research has found that features such as interactional synchrony is universal.