Culture & Gender

• Culture - values and beliefs that are passed on from one generation to another within a social group
• Cultural bias - the tendency to judge people in terms of one's own cultural assumptions.
• Ethnocentrism - seeing the world only from one's own cultural perspective, and believing that this one perspective is both normal and correct. eg. clothes, food
• cultural relativism - appreciating that norms/practices may differ among cultures, and what is considered right in one culture may be seen as wrong in another. eg. amount of alcohol consumption
• Alpha bias - theories that assume there are real and enduring differences between cultures, thus they exaggerate the difference
• Beta bias - theories that ignore or minimise existing differences.

  eg. intelligence testing between cultures (IQ can vary in dif situations)
• W.E.I.R.D represents 80% of studies despite accounting for 12% population

  • Western
  • Educated
  • Industrialised
  • Rich
  • Democratic
• Individualist - only caring for your own wants and needs
• Collectivist - working for the benefit of those around you
• Imposed etic - when findings are found within one culture but generalised world wide
• Etic approach - looking at behaviour from outside the culture, and attempting to describe universal behaviours
• gender bias - if a study is conducted only on one gender but generalised to both, mainly males on females
• Androcentrism - centred focus on men, often neglecting women
• Universality - when findings from research can be generalised to all people, irrespective of genders and cultures, all psychologists should aim for this
• Briefly explain how the researchers could have dealt with the issue of social sensitivity in this study.

  • awareness of the issue: effect on children/crayford school
  • Dealing with the issue: debriefing ppts/teachers/parents
• Emic approach - investigates behaviour from within a culture, focusing on the unique norms of that culture. It doesn't assume universal laws and aims to understand how behaviour is interpreted by members of that culture