Culture bias

• Universality


  The belief that all humans are alike, so what is true for one person is true for everyone
• Cultural universality


  The belief that some behaviours are the same for all cultures
• Cultural bias


  A tendency to judge all people in terms of your own cultural assumptions, distorting our judgement of other cultures
• Ethnocentrism


  A type of cultural bias where people see the world only from their own cultural perspective and believe that this perspective is both normal and correct
• Ethnocentrism

  • Emphasising the importance of the behaviour of one's own culture
  • Believing the ethnic group with which one identifies is superior and 'the norm', and that those of other groups are strange or deviant
  • Using one's own cultural group as a basis for judgements about other groups
• Belief in the superiority of one's own culture


  May lead to prejudice and discrimination towards other cultures
• Cultural relativism


  The idea/belief that it is essential to consider the cultural context when examining behaviour in that culture
• Cultural relativism

  • Appreciates that behaviour varies across cultures
  • There is no global 'right' and 'wrong', it varies across culture
  • It is important to consider the behaviour of the individual within their culture before making a judgment
  • Context is vital
  • Social norms are culturally relative as what is considered acceptable in one culture may be unacceptable elsewhere
• Emic approach

  Investigates behaviour from within a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture
• Etic approach


  Investigates behaviour from outside of a culture and attempts to describe those behaviours that are universal
• An etic approach is more likely to produce culturally-biased research
• Imposed etic


  Occurs when theories and concepts are assumed to be universal, despite coming from emic research within a single culture
• Imposed etic


  • Ainsworth's Strange Situation research assumes an American-based model of classifying attachment is the norm
  • The use of this method on other cultures imposes etic assumptions that participants are all accustomed this method
• Psychologists should be more mindful of the cultural relativism of their research – that the information they discover may only makes sense from the perspective of the culture within which they were discovered – and being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding cultural bias in research
• An issue with culturally biased research is that it can result in the formation of damaging stereotypes
• Culturally biased research

  • Before the Second World War, the US Army used a culturally biased IQ test which showed that African-Americans were at the bottom of the scale with the lowest mental age
• Culturally biased research

  Had a negative effect on the attitudes held by Americans towards certain groups of people - black people and people from south-eastern Europe
• This research is one example of the negative impact that culturally biased research can have
• Indigenous psychologies


  The development of different groups of theories in different countries
• Afrocentrism


  • Disputes the view that European values are universally appropriate descriptions of human behaviour that apply equally to Europeans and non-Europeans alike
  • Suggests that the European values and culture are irrelevant to the life and culture of people of African descent
• One way to counter ethnocentrism in psychology is to encourage 'indigenous psychologies'
• Researchers in psychology travel much more now than they did 50 years ago
• Academics regularly meet to discuss and exchange ideas, so there is a much greater exchange of ideas, which should reduce ethnocentrism in psychology, enabling an understanding of cultural relativism so that real differences are identified and valued
• This perhaps suggests that cultural bias in research is less of an issue than it once was
• Identifying the possible issues of cultural bias

  • Has significantly increased our understanding of the impact of culture, cultural differences and culture specific behaviours
  • Has had major benefits, for example in the diagnosis of mental illness where culture specific behaviours, were often misdiagnosed as symptomatic of psychological abnormality
  • Has had practical advantages, such as recent issues of diagnostic manuals such as the DSM now including a list of culture specific behaviours to help clinicians appreciate cultures specific behaviours and greatly increases the validity and reliability of the diagnostic process
• The increase in sensitivity to cultural bias and cultural differences has had major benefits, both within Psychology and beyond