culture

• cultural bias

  researchers misrepresenting differences between cultures
• ethnocentrism

  • focussing on your own culture perspectives
  • involves assuming own cultural perspective is correct or more important
  • seeing other cultures and social practises as abnormal
• ethnocentric bias

  • when psychology research lacks validity or reliability due to ethnocentrism, we say research suffers from ethnocentric bias
  • from ignoring cultures / cultural perspectives
• consequences of ethnocentrism

  • may lack external reliability and external validity
  • results may not generalise to other cultures
  • Second, ethnocentric standards for ‘normal behaviour’ mean that people from other cultures might be misdiagnosed with psychological conditions, because they are seen to be behaving abnormally.
• consequences of ethnocentric bias

  • Mary Ainsworth's research on attachment styles
  • she assumed babies from other cultures would behave in the same way.
  • babies in collectivist cultures have different attachment styles from Americans.
• cultural relativism

  behaviours must be understood from a specific culture
• Cross cultural research 


  researchers from a number of different cultures, to minimise the risk of ethnocentric bias.

  research being carried out in different cultures, to see if theories generalise, or if there are cultural variations