Culture bias

• What is culture bias and universality?

  • 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. (2010) reviewed studies and found that 68% of participants came from the US and 96% from industrialised nations
  • WEIRD (people most likely to be studied by psychologists) Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democracies
  • Norms and behaviours are set by WEIRD people meaning behaviour of people from non-Western, less educated, agricultural and poorer cultures are seen as abnormal and unusual
• What is ethnocentrism?

  • A belief in the superiority of one's own cultural group by judging other cultures by the standards and values of their own
  • Ainsworth (1970)'s Strange Situation is an example, only reflecting the rearing practices of Western cultures and misinterpreting the rearing activities of other countries e.g. Japanese infants more likely to be classed as insecurely attached when in reality the finding was due to cultural differences
• What is cultural relativism?

  • The idea that norms and values as well as ethics and moral standards can only be meaningful and understood properly within specific social and cultural contexts
  • Being able to recognise this is a way of avoiding culture bias in research
• What are etic and emic approaches?

  • Etic approaches look at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe these as universal
  • Emic approaches function from inside the culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture
• What is imposed etic?

  • Studying behaviour inside one culture and assuming that these can be applied universally
  • Psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach arguing that theories and concepts are universal when in reality they came about through emic research inside a single culture
• What is an implication of culture bias?

  • Classic studies: culture bias is a feature of many influential studies in psychology such as social influence
  • Asch and Milgram's original samples were conducted exclusively with US participants, most of whom were white and middle-class
  • Replications of these studies in different cultures found higher rates of conformity than the original US studies, suggesting our understanding of topics like social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures
• What is another implication of culture bias?

  • Emergence of cultural psychology: Cohen (2017) suggests cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experiences, an emerging field that strives to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside cultures
  • Cross-cultural research tends to focus on just 2 cultures suggesting modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it
• What is another implication of culture bias?

  • Ethnic stereotyping: culture bias has led to prejudice against groups of people
  • Gould (1981) explained how the first IQ tests led to eugenic social policies in the US as many items on it were ethnocentric e.g. assuming everyone would know the names of US presidents
  • European and African-Americans received lower scores yet this was not taken as a sign of the test's inadequacy - instead was used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular ethnic groups, deeming them mentally unfit in comparison to the white majority
  • In turn ethnic groups were denied educational and professional opportunities, illustrating how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards minority groups
• What is another implication of culture bias?

  • Relativism vs. universality: cross-cultural research is beneficial in the sense that it challenges dominant individualist ways of viewing the world, providing a better understanding of human nature
  • Yet it shouldn't be assumed that ALL psychology is culturally relative and that there is no such thing as universal behaviour
  • Ekman (1989) suggests basic human facial expressions for emotions are the same all over the human and animal world as well as features of attachment like interactional synchrony