Cultural Bias

• Cultural Bias: when researchers misrepresent the difference between cultures.
• Universality: when a theory of behaviour applies to everyone. But its difficult to do this because there are differences between cultures.
• Ethnocentrism: When someone focuses on their own cultural perspective and/or believes that their culture is superior to to others.

  (e.g. Mary Ainsworth).
• Cultural relativism: Behaviours must be understood from the perspective of a specific culture.
• Limitation) Many studies are culturally biased. Asch and MIlgrams orgiianl studies used only white middle class US paricitpants. Asch found that collectivist cultures had higher rates of conformity. This means that we can only apply our understanding of social influence to individualistic cultures.
• Strength) Cultural psychology is when research is conduced from inside a culture, using researchers from that cultures. This means that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias.