Cultural Bias

• 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
  • suggests that much psychological research is severely unrepresentative and can be greatly improved by simply selecting different cultural groups to study
• Universality + Bias

  • critics argue mainstream psychology has generally ignored culture as an important influence on human behaviour and by doing so, has mistakenly assumed that findings derived from studies carried out in individualist cultures can be applied all over the world.
  • e.g Asch/Milgram
  • if the ‘norm’ for a particular behaviour is judged only from the standpoint of one particular culture, then any cultural differences in behaviour that deviate from this standard will inevitably be seen as ‘abnormal’ 
• Culture Bias

  • A tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena through the lens of one’s own culture.
• Chitling Test

  • example of a culturally biased test that tends to favour African Americans. People of other cultures traditionally underperform
  • designed to demonstrate differences in understanding and culture between races, specifically between African Americans and Whites
• Alpha Bias

  When a theory assumes that cultural groups are profoundly different, recognition of these differences must always inform research
• Beta Bias

  When real cultural differences are ignored or minimised and all people are assumed to be the same
• Emic Constructs

  • specific to a given culture and vary from one culture to another
  • look at behaviour from the inside of the cultural system
• Etic Constructs (ouTside culture)

  • Analyses of behaviour focuses on the universal of human behaviour, universal factors that hold across all cultures.
  • looking at behaviour from outside of the culture
• Ethnocentrism

  • the belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic and cultural group.  Our own cultural perspective is taken as a standard by which we measure other cultures.
• Culture

  • The beliefs and customs that a group of people share, such as child-rearing practices
• Cultural Relativism

  • Behaviour cannot be judged properly unless it is viewed in the context of the culture in which it originates.
• Berry

  • Psychology has been argued to take an imposed etic approach because it argues that theories/concepts are universal despite research being conducted using emic constructs within a specific culture. BERRY (1969)
• Depression

  • cross-cultural research in psychology shows there are substantial variations in depressive experience and disorder
  • Different historical and cultural traditions frame depressive experience and disorders differently
  • e.g - in some cultures, depression may be experienced largely in somatic terms (affecting the body) rather than with sadness or guilt. Complaints of nerves and headaches (in Latino and Mediterranean cultures), of weakness, tiredness, or imbalance (in Chinese and Asian cultures) and problems of the "heart" (in Middle Eastern cultures) may express depressive experiences
• Milgram

  • tested American males and found 65% of pps, although unwilling, administered full scale shock -Milgram claimed such high levels of obedience were due to ‘power of social situation’
  • may be many factors, specific to America, which may have resulted in such findings, e.g Americans may be have more respect for authority figures as they value police system, or they may be more obedient due to American schooling and so on
  • attempt to take an etic approach, yet it was conducted through emic constructs
• Milgram - 2

  • Milgram’s results have not been replicated in different countries - different countries = different results - indicates cultural differences - Milgram's conclusions may hold cultural bias
• Ainsworth's Strange Situation

  • Conducted in America, Ainsworth tested children’s anxiety on separation from a primary care giver
  • found that the ideal attachment type was secure in which the infant displayed moderate levels of anxiety when separated with a primary care giver
  • however, this type of attachment is not typical across all cultures: does this mean that their child-rearing practices are inadequate, even damaging?
• Ainsworth's Strange Situation:

  • Ainsworth Strange Situation & Van Ijzendoorn’s Cross-Cultural research on attachment - german kids show higher rates of insecure-avoidant attachment - other cultures showed different results
  • this is described as being an imposed etic - she studied behaviour within a single culture (America) and then assumed her ideal attachment type could be applied universally so suffers from ethnocentric bias