Cultural bias

• Cultural bias is ...

  Cultural bias is having a distorted view of other cultures, e.g. by assuming another culture is the same as your own. If their behaviour is different it is viewed as being abnormal
• Why does cultural bias cause problems?

  Culture bias causes problems for psychologists because they may design an experiment carefully. But if they use experimental methods or theories that are not relevant to the culture they are studying, the findings will not be objective. This means that psychology as a science is questioned
• What is Ethnocentrism?

  Ethnocentrism is seeing the world only from ones own cultural perspective and believing that this one perspective is both normal and correct
• What is a consequence of ethnocentrism?

  A consequence is this is that explanations may only work for a certain cultural group such as white Americans therefore we have to question the findings of studies which attempt to generalise their findings to the population as a whole
• what is an example of Ethnocentrism

  Rack (1984) claims that African Caribbean's in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as 'mentally ill' on the basis of behaviour which is perfectly normal in their subculture, and this is due to the ignorance of Afro-Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists
• What is Etic

  Etic is when you conduct research outside the cultural setting. E.g. A British person investigating African attachment behaviour
• What is Emic

  When you conduct research within your cultural setting. E.g. A British person investigating British attachment behaviour
• What is imposed etic

  This is where a theoretical idea or piece of research is conducted in one culture and then assumed to apply to all cultural groups
• What is an example of Imposed etic

  Mary Ainsworth produced a method of investigating infant attachment types called the 'strange situation'. She created and tested her method on American infants and then used it to asses attachment styles around the world
• What is Imposed Emic

  This is where a theoretical idea or piece of research is conducted in one culture and then assumed to apply to all cultural groups
• What is an example of Imposed Emic

  Cole investigated how objects can be sorted into groups. He found that Western cultures chose to group by category while African cultures chose to group objects by their usefulness. This suggests to us that the definition of intelligence is difference in each culture
• What is Cultural relativism

  Cultural relativism insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken into consideration
• Etic approach

  Studying behaviour across many different cultures in order to find universal human behaviours
• Individualist cultures

  Refers to Western cultures that are thought to be more independent
• A strength of Cultural bias

  An application of understanding cultural bias is that there have been many improvements in the field of diagnosing mental disorders. Early diagnostic manuals virtually ignored mental disorders found in non-American cultures, however, modern diagnostic manuals now include many culturally bound syndromes such as pa-fend (fear of wind) in china and brain fog ( problems concentrating and thinking caused by excessive study) found in West Africa
• A strength of Cultural bias

  A positive of cultural bias such as imposed emic is that it emphasises every cultures uniqueness by focusing on culturally specific phenomena
• A strength of Cultural bias

  A benefit of understanding cultural relativism is that it promotes greater sensitivity to the different behaviours displayed around the world
• A strength of Cultural bias

  One way to deal with cultural bias is to recognise when it occurs. Smith and Bond found, in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social psychology, that 66% of the studies were American, 32% European, only 2% from the rest of the world. This suggests that much psychological research is severely unrepresentative and can be greatly improved by simply selecting different cultural groups to study
• A weakness of Cultural bias

  It is wrong to assume that ALL behaviour is culturally relative ( different around the world) because research has found that behaviours such as facial expressions and interactional synchrony are universal ( not culturally bound).
• A weakness of Cultural bias

  Cultural bias such as Imposed Emic can lead to negative stereotyping and prejudice. The American army used an IQ test before WW1 which was culturally bias towards the white majority. White Americans scored highly but African-Americans performed poorly. This contributed to the negative stereotypes of this ethnic group.