Cultural bias

• Bias

  • Occurs when a psychologists pre-existing beliefs and viewpoints influence their theories and data interpretation.
  • Stems from personal experiences, cultural background, education, political beliefs, gender-related societal experiences.
• Cultural bias

  • Occurs when human behaviour is interpreted and judged through the lens of ones own cultural expectations and norms.
• Example of cultural bias in schizophrenia

  • In the Uk and West Indies, schizophrenia prevalence is around 1%.
  • However individuals from the West Indies living in the UK have a significantly higher diagnosis rate, being 9 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
  • Fernando, suggests this discrepancy is due to a category failure where Western decisions of mental health are inappropriately applied to non-western populations
  • For instance, hearing the voices of angels might be considered a normal religious experience in the West Indies but in the UK, it is likely to be interpreted as an auditory hallucination.
• Ethnocentrism

  • Judging other cultures by the standards and values of ones own culture.
  • In its extreme form is it the belief in the superiority of ones own culture which may lead to prejudice and discrimination towards other cultures.
• Example of ethnocentrism

  • Mary Ainsworth’s strange situation
  • Developed in the American context, which means it may not accurately assess child-rearing practices and values across other cultures.
  • Secure attachment is argued to be the most desirable outcome in the Strange situation and is the most common type in Western, Industrialised societies.
  • This could be an example of imposed Etic, where a researchers cultural norms are assumed to be applicable as a standard for all cultures.
• Cultural relativism

  • The idea that norms and values as well as ethics and moral standards can only be meaningful and understood within specific social and cultural contexts.
• Dealing with bias

  • In theory construction researchers should not assume universal norms or differences across cultures, any claims of universality should be supported by empirical data.
  • Equal representation of researchers, including encouraging indigenous psychologists where research is conducted by individuals who are native or deeply understand the culture under investigation.
  • Diverse samples, cross cultural research or comparisons.
• Example of cross-cultural research

  • Van Ijzendoorn’s meta-analysis of the strange situation who compared findings across different cultural contexts.
• Etic approach

  An etic approach looks at the behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal.
• Emic approach

  An emic approach functions from within certain cultures and identifies behaviour which is specific to that culture
• One limitation is many influential studies in psychology are culturally biased. For example, both Asch’s and Milgram’s original studies were conducted with US participants, most were white and middle-class students. Replication of these studies in different countries produced different results. For instance Smith and Bond found high rates of conformity in collectivist cultures compared to the original studies in the US. Therefore this suggests our understanding of social influence can only be applied to individualistic cultures
• Counterpoint: However in an age of increased media globalisation, it is argued that the individualistic-collectivist distinction no longer applies. Tokano and Osaka found that 14/15 studies compared between the US and Japan found no evidence of individualism and collectivism. This contradicts the traditional argument that individualistic countries like the US value individuals and independence, whereas collectivist cultures like India and China value society and the needs of the group. Therefore this suggests that cultural bias in research may be less of an issue is more recent psychological research.
• One strength of our awareness of cultural bias is the emergence of cultural psychology. Cohen proposed cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. Cultural psychology aims to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture often alongside local researchers using culturally based techniques. Therefore this suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it.
• One limitation of cultural bias is it has led to prejudice against groups of people. Gould, explained the first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies. Psychologists used WW1 to pilot the first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Items on the test were ethnocentric e.g assuming everyone would know the names of US presidents. Results found recruits from other areas of the world had the lowest scores. The performance of these groups was not taken as a sign of the tests inadequacy. Ethnic minorities were deemed mentally unfit in comparison to the white majority and were denied educational and professional opportunities. Therefore cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain cultural and ethnic groups.