Culture bias:

• Universality and bias

  Henrich et al reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals found that 68% of research pp came from the United States 96% from industrialised nations

  • Suggest that what we know about human behaviour has a strong cultural bias
  • Psychologists routinely claim to have discovered 'facts' about universal human behaviour
• Universality and bias

  • Henrich et al coined the term WEIRD to describe the group of people most likely to be studied by psychologists Westernised, Educated people from Industrialised, Rich Democracies

  If the norm or standard for a particular behaviour is set by WEIRD people, then the behaviour of those from poorer cultures is inevitably seen as abnormal
• Ethnocentrism

  Refers to a belief in the superiority of one's own cultural group

  IE: Ainsworth and Bell's Strange Situation criticised as reflecting only the norms and values of what is sometimes called 'Western' culture.

  • Conducted research on attachment type suggesting that ideal' attachment was characterised by the babies showing moderate amounts of distress when left alone by their mother-figure.
• Ethnocentrism:

  • Led to misinterpretation of child-rearing practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American norm

  IE Japanese infants were more likely to be classed as insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress on separation Takahashi. It is likely that this finding was due to the fact that Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mother
• Cultural relativism


  Berry has drawn a distinction between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour

  • Etic approach looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal.
  • Emic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture
• Cultural relativism


  ETIC: Ainsworth and Bell's research they studied behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed their ideal attachment type could be applied universally

  • Berry argues that psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach - arguing that theories etc, are universal, when they actually came about through emic research inside a single culture
• Cultural relativism

  Psychologists should be more mindful of the cultural relativism of their research that the 'things' they discover may only make 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