Issues & Debates

• Cultural Bias

  • Psychologists typically used people that were available to them in studies - people from the same culture. Historically there has been a lack of research for comparing people from different cultures.
  • Various cultural perspectives and differences have been ignored or underrepresented.
• Reasons for Cultural Variations

  • Discrimination with the view of non-western cultures being ‘primitive’ or not worthy of study.
  • Cross-cultural research is expensive, time consuming and demands many resources. This makes it challenging to conduct.
• Etic Research

  • When research based on one culture is generalised and applied to all culture.
• Emic Research

  • Research based on studying a specific culture.
• Etic Research Strengths

  • Humans from various cultures do have similarities.
  • Certain behaviours are also universal, e.g language development.
• Etic Weaknesses

  • Challenging to apply principles and conclusions from one study to all culture.
  • Researchers may be bias due to imposed etic.
• Emic Research Strengths

  • Avoids cultural bias and bias of imposed etic.
  • Not trying to generate universal laws.
• Emic Weaknesses

  • Bias can still happen, due to the over-emphasis of differences between cultural groups and not looking at the differences within cultural groups.
• Sub-culture Bias

  • Smaller sub-groups within larger cultural groups.
  • For example, when examining British culture as a whole, there could be sub-groups of male and female.
• Gender Bias

  • Results from one gender are treated less favourably then the other.
• Alpha Bias

  • Exaggerating the differences between men and women.
• Beta Bias

  • Exaggerating the similarity between men and women, minimising gender differences.
• Andocentrism

  • Taking male behaviours as normal and regarding female thinking as abnormal.
• Ethnocentrism

  • When the culture of the psychologist is treated as the norm.
• Asch’s Line Study (Ethnocentrism)

  • Aschs research into conformity 1951 concluded that people will conform to majority opinion.
  • Because only Americans were used the research is Ethnocentric.
• Milgram (Ethnocentrism)

  • Milgrams obedience experiments 1963 used only an American sample, therefore producing results with an imposed etic.
• Cochrane and Sashidharan

  • Found that Afro-Carribean descenders were seven times more likely to be diagnosed.
  • This lead people to assume they have a higher genetic predisposition for it, however, their rates are no higher then the UK’s.
• Littlewood and Lipsedge (1989)

  • Found that Afro-Caribbean’s were more likely to be prescribed higher doses of medications