2. culture bias Flashcards
UNIVERSALITY AND BIAS (REVISITED)
A similar issue arises with respect to culture.
Henrich et al. reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals and found…
%
68% of research participants came from the US, and 96% from industrialised nations.
Another review found 80% of research participants were undergraduates studying psychology.
ETHNOCENTRISM
Refers to
a particular form of culture bias it is a belief in the superiority of one’s own cultural group.
Such findings suggest what we know about human behaviour has a strong cultural bias.
Heinrich 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 people from
(opposite)
non-westernised, less educated agricultural and poorer cultures is inevitably seen as abnormal, inferior, or unusual.
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation is an example of ethnocentrism as it…
has been criticised for reflecting only the norms and values of the western culture. They conducted research on attachment type, suggesting ideal attachment was characterised by babies showing moderate amounts of distress when left alone by their mother figure (secure attachment). However, this led to misrepresentation of child rearing practices in other countries which seemed to deviate from the American norm e.g. Japanese infants were much more likely to be classed as insecure-resistant as they showed considerable distress on separation. It is likely that this finding was due to the fact that Japanese babies are rarely separated by their mothers.
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
An emic approach functions from
inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture.
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
An etic approach looks at behaviour from
outside a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal.
Ainsworth’s research is an example of an imposed etic because
they studied behaviours in one culture and assumed their ideal attachment type and the means of assessing it could be applied universally.
Berry argued that psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach - arguing that theories, models etc are universal when they actually came about
through emic research inside a single culture. The suggestion is that psychologists should be much more mindful of 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.
Being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding cultural bias in research.
AO3: strength of cultural bias
CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Cultural bias has led to the emergence of cultural psychology.
Cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. This is an emerging field that incorporates work from researchers in other disciplines including anthropology and sociology. Cultural psychologists aim to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture often alongside local researchers using culturally based techniques. Cross-cultural research tends to focus on just two cultures instead of larger scale studies.
This suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it.
AO3: limitation of cultural bias
CLASSIC STUDIES - Asch, Milgram
Many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally biased.
For example, Asch and Milgram’s studies were conducted exclusively with US participants most of whom were white, middle-class males. Replications of these studies in different countries produced different results, for example Asch type experiments in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the US, an individualist culture.
This suggests that our understanding of topics such as social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures.
AO3: limitation of cultural bias
ETHNIC STEREOTYPING - WWI, US (Gould)
Cultural bias has led to prejudice against groups of people.
Gould explained how the first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in the US. Psychologists used WW1 as an opportunity to pilot the first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Many items on the tests were ethnocentric e.g. names of the US presidents. The results were that recruits from south-eastern Europe and Africana Americans received the lowest scores. The poor performance of these groups was taken to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular cultural groups. Ethnic minorities were deemed mentally unfit and feeble minded in comparison to the white majority and denied educational and professional opportunities as a result.
This shows how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain cultural groups.
