Culture Bias

• Psychologists have often ignored cultural differences and assumed that everyone was the same so whatever was found out about people

  from one culture was generalised to all other people.
• Cultural Bias

  The tendency to judge all people in terms of your own cultural assumptions. This can then bias your judgement and may make any cultural differences in behaviour that deviate from this be seen as abnormal/ inferior/ unusual.
• Ethnocentrism

  A form of cultural bias. Belief in the superiority of one's own cultural group. Seeing the world from one's own cultural perspective and assuming these beliefs, customs and behaviour are 'normal' or 'right'

  When other cultures are observed to differ from the researcher's own, they may be regarded in a negative light.
• Ethnocentrism e.g.

  The Strange Situation

  • developed to assess attachment types, reflected norms of US culture and many researchers assumed it had the same meanings for infants from other cultures as it does for American children
  • secure attachment was seen as the norm BUT this led to misinterpretation of child rearing practices in other cultures which were seen to deviate from the American 'norm', e.g. German mothers were seen as cold and rejecting rather than encouraging independence in their own children.
• Emic constructs are specific to a given culture. These can be ignored in research if the researcher assumes an emic to be an etic.
• Etic constructs are assumed to be universal, when they might not be
• An imposed etic is a technique or theory developed in one culture and then applied to another culture. This may lead to misinterpretation of behaviours in other cultures, e.g. using the Strange Situation outside the UK/USA
• e.g. Culture bias in Asch's research

  Ethnocentric as he only studies Amiercans and assumed his findings were an Etic (generalised findings to groups that had not been studied.)

  Variations found different levels of conformity depending on the culture being studied.
• e.g. US Army IQ test

  Yerkes

  • showed that African Americans were at the borrom of the scale in terms of IQ
  • the data from this test had a profound effect on the attitudes held by Americans towards certain groups of people, especially black people and people from south Eastern Europe
  • average mental age for white Americans was just above the edge of moronity (13)

  Consequences

  • the army tests engendered a variety of social uses
  • first written IQ tests to gain respect
  • other propagandists used the army results to defend racial segregation and limited access of black people to access higher eduaction
• Cultural relativism

  In a way this is the opposite of ethnocentrism

  Behaviour can only be properly understood if it is viewed in the context of the culture in which it originates, e.g. understanding that hearing voices is seen as normal in some cultures such as the Shaman. Being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding cultural bias in research.
• A03

  • A problem with cross cultural research is that there may be bias in the research methods.
  • Sears reported that 82% of research studies used an undergraduates as Ps and 51% were psychology students.
  • In 2010, 67% were American psychology students. This suggests that a considerable amount of psychology is based on middle class, academic, young adults (often males)
  • Psychology findings are not only unrepresentative on a global scale, but also within Western culture, it also suggests a cultural bias in textbooks.
• A03

  Cultural bias has social implications as psychologists make claims that are not actually true. For e.g. stereotypes concerning ethnic groups and their IQ. Furthermore, an example of this comes from the DSM which claims that Afro-Carribeans are up to 9x more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than white patients which can lead to culture based assumptions that influence how people's behaviour is interpreted.
• A03

  One strength of developing knowledge of culturally biased research is that it may help to challenge assumptions and Western ways of thinking about behaviour. Understanding that our knowledge and concepts may not be shared in other cultures may help to promote a greater awareness and sensitivity of individual differences and cultural relativism. It also means that conclusions psychologists draw are more likely to be valid.

  Cross cultural research encourages the inclusion of a member of the local population as they will be able to educate the researcher about cultural practices and overcome language barriers, thus preventing the issue ot cultural bias.
• A03

  • INDIVIDUALIST vs COLLECTIVIST
  • individualists value personal freedom and independence
  • collectivists value interdependence and the needs of a group
  • due to levels of interconnectedness in today's world, this distinction has been criticised as being too simplistic
  • Takano and Osaka found little distinction between the cultures which suggests that cultural bias is less of an issue that it once was