Culture bias

• Culture bias - overlooking cultural differences by looking at human behaviour from the perspective of your own culture
• Ethnocentrism - evaluating other cultures by the standards of one’s culture
• Cultural relativism - the idea that culture can only be understood within specific social and cultural contexts
• Etic approach - studying behaviour across many cultures to find universal behaviours
• Emic approach - studying cultures in isolation by identifying behaviours specific to that culture
• Imposed etic - one culture is used to explain behaviour of another culture

  • Eg the Strange Situation
• Culture bound syndrome - illnesses only present in certain cultures
• Research tradition - the familiarity a certain culture has with taking part in psychological studies
• Alpha bias - The Strange Situation:

  Japanese children categorised as more insecure-resistant, but in their culture it is normal to not be separated from mum until an older age, so their response is actually normal
• Beta bias - IQ tests in the USA:

  African-Americans did worse as based on knowledge of the USA - used to justify discrimination
• Some behaviours universally generalisable - Fedorenko et al (2002) found Broca’s area is involved in language production across 45 different languages
• Kilham and Mann (1974) - Using Milgrams study, in Australia 16% of women and 40% of men obeyed, compared to the original 65%
• Hard to operationalise variables - variables may be experienced differently in different cultures
• Temporal validity issues - the distinction between individualist and collectivist cultures gets smaller over time. Izjendoorn and Kroonenberg found variation within countries is greater than variation between countries.
• Reflexivity may make research methodologies better - eg cross-cultural researchers insist on having at least one member of the local population on their research team