culture bias

• culture 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
• cultural relativism


  insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken into consideration
• ethnocentrism (example)


  Ainsworth's Strange Situation - developed to assess attachment type, with researchers assuming that the Strange Situation has the same meaning for the infants from other cultures as it does for American children
• cultural relativism


  the meaning of intelligence is different in every culture - advanced coordination skills that were essential to life in a preliterate society (those required for shooting a bow and arrow) may be mostly irrelevant to intelligent behaviour in a literate and more developed society
• etic


  behaviour described as being universal (smiling in response to happiness)
• emic


  behaviour described in the context of a specific culture - culture-bound syndromes such as 'taijin kyofusho' in Japan - a fear of upsetting and displeasing others
• imposed etic


  a technique or theory developed in one culture and then used to study the behaviour of people in a different culture with difference norms, values or experiences (Strange Situation)
• universality



  insists that human behaviour is the same across cultures and genders despite differences in upbringing
• ao3 - culture bias is no longer as much of an issue as it was before

  
  

  critics have suggested that in this age of globalisation, the differences between individualist cultures (Western cultures thought to value personal freedom and independence) and collectivist cultures (emphasis placed on the need of the group rather than the individual) is too simplistic and that people may no longer be as culturally different as once thought, with research comparing USA and Japan finding little evidence of the traditional distinction
• ao3 - applications


  research into culture bias can help develop techniques to reduce it

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  emic research within cultures -> development of theories relevant to the people living within that culture on which the emic research was conducted - but, the findings only help us to understand the particular culture in which the research was conducted and therefore does not allow for the development of universal laws of behaviour (purpose of psychology) or understand any other culture
• ao3 - reflexivity


  awareness of biases when conducting research and developing theories - researchers may include reflection on how cultural differences could influence the results of an experiment - it can lead to the revising of previous theories where culture bias has not been addressed and any false assumptions made about certain minorities can be corrected
• ao3 - implications


  culturally biased research can have significant real-world effects, such as amplifying and validating damaging stereotypes - the US army used an IQ test before WWI that catered towards the white majority and so, unsurprisingly, it showed African-Americans to be at the bottom of the IQ scale - this resulted in negative perception and treatment towards them, highlighting the real-world consequences of culturally biased research
• ao3 - creation of indigenous psychologies

  theories drawing explicitly on the particular experiences of people in a certain cultural context - Afrocentrism is a movement suggesting all research surrounding Africans should recognise the cultural context of their behaviours - leading to emergence of theories more relevant to the lives and cultures of many people