Culture bias

Cards (18)

  • Culture bias = a tendency to interpret all phenomena through the ‘lens’ of one’s own culture ignoring the effects that cultural differences might have on behaviour
  • Henrich et al. reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals and found that 68% of research participants came from the US, and 96% were from industrialised nations. Another review found that 80% of research participants were undergraduates studying psychology. Such findings suggest what we know about human behaviour has a strong cultural bias.
  • Henrich et al. coined the term WEIRD to describe the group of people most likely to be studied by psychologists - Westernised, Educated people from Industrialised, Rich Democracies.
  • If the norm or standard for a particular behaviour is set by WEIRD people, then the behaviour of people from non-Westernised, less educated, agricultural and poorer cultures is inevitably seen as ‘abnormal’ , ‘inferior’ or ’unusual’.
  • Ethnocentrism = a particular form of cultural bias and is a belief in the superiority of one’s own cultural group
  • People from the US and Europe may have an ethnocentric view of human behaviour.
  • Ainsworth and Bell’s Strange Situation is an example of ethnocentrism. They conducted research on attachment type, suggesting that the ‘ideal‘ attachment was characterised by babies showing moderate amounts of distress when left alone by their mothers.
  • However, Ainsworth and Bell’s ‘ideal’ attachment type led to misinterpretation of child-rearing practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American ‘norm’. For example Japanese infants were much more likely to be classed as insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress in separation. It is likely this was due to the fact that Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mothers.
  • Berry has drawn a distinction between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour.
  • An etic approach looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal.
  • An emic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture.
  • Ainsworth and Bell’s research is an example of an imposed etic - they studied behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed their ideal attachment type (and the method for assessing it) could be applied universally.
  • Another example of an imposed etic approach can be considered in relation to how we define abnormality.
  • Berry argues that psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach - arguing that theories, models, concepts etc. are universal, when they actually came from emic research inside a single culture. The suggestion is that psychologists should be more mindful of the culture relativism of their research - that the ‘things’ they discover may only make sense from the perspective of the culture within which they were discovered.
  • A limitation is that many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally-biased. For instance, both Asch’s and Milgram’s original studies were conducted exclusively with US participants (most of whom were white, middle-class students). Replications of these studies in different countries produced very different results. For example, Asch-type experiments in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than in individualist cultures. This suggests that understanding of topics such as social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures.
  • However, in an age of increased media globalisation, it is argued that the individualist-collectivist distinction no longer applies. The traditional argument is that individualist countries value individuals and independence, whilst collectivist cultures value society and the needs of the group. However, Takano and Osaka found 14 out of 15 studies that compare the US and Japan found no evidence of individualism or collectivism - describing the distinction as lazy and simplistic. This suggests cultural bias in research may be less of an issue in more recent psychological research.
  • A strength is the emergence of cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is, according to Cohen, the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. Cultural psychologists strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture, often alongside local researchers using culturally-based techniques. This suggests that modern psychologist are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias are taking steps to avoid it.
  • A limitation is it has led to prejudice against certain groups. Gould explained how the first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in the US. Psychologists use WW1 to pilot their first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Many of the items on the test were ethnocentric. Resulting in recruits from south-eastern Europe and African-Americans receiving the lowest scores. This was used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of certain cultural and ethnic groups. Ethnic minorities were deemed ‘mentally unfit’ and denied educational and professional opportunities.