Cultural Bias

Question 1

Universality

Answer 1

The principle that a given value, behaviour, theory, or treatment will be the same across all groups independent of culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and other social identities

Question 2

Ethnocentrism

Answer 2

Judging other cultures by the standards and values of one’s own culture. In its extreme form it is the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture which may lead to prejudice and discrimination towards other cultures.

Question 3

Eurocentrism

Answer 3

Bias centred around European and Western cultures, belief that Western/European cultures are superior

Question 4

Cultural Relitivism

Answer 4

The idea that norms and values, as well as ethics and moral standards, can only be meaningful and understood within specific social and cultural contexts

Question 5

Emic

Answer 5

Refers to research that fully studies one culture with no (or only a secondary) cross-cultural focus.

Question 6

Etic

Answer 6

Refers to research that studies cross-cultural differences

Question 7

WEIRD

Answer 7

Westernised, educated people from industrialised, Rich Democracies

Question 8

Alpha Bias

Answer 8

exaggerates the differences between cultures, perhaps because a piece of research focuses only on two wildly opposing cultures

Question 9

Beta Bias

Answer 9

minimises the differences between cultures, perhaps because a piece of research studies one culture and applies the results to all other cultures.

Question 10

Discuss research to show universality and bias

Answer 10

Henrich et al. (2010) reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals and found that 68% of research participants came from the United States and 96% from industrialised nations. Another review found that 80% of research participants were undergraduates studying psychology.

Such findings suggest that what we know about human behaviour has a strong cultural bias.

Question 11

Explain origin and affects of WEIRD

Answer 11

Henrich et al. Invented 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 non-Westernised, less educated, agricultural and poorer cultures is inevitably seen as ‘abnormal’, ‘inferior’ or ‘unusual’.

Question 12

How does Henrich’s findings support the existence of ethnocentrism

Answer 12

Ethnocentrism refers to a particular form of cultural bias and is a belief in the superiority of one’s own cultural group. Henrich’s findings suggest that people from the US and Europe have presented an ethnocentric view of human behaviour.

Question 13

What is a piece of research displaying ethnocentrism?

Answer 13

Ainsworth and Bell’s strange situation is an example of this, criticised as reflecting only the norms and values of what is sometimes called ‘Western’ culture. They 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 (typical of secure attachment). However, this led to misinterpretation of child-rearing practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American ‘norm’.

For example, Japanese infants were much more likely to be classed as insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress on separation. It is likely that this finding was because Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mother.

Question 14

What did Berry discover?

Answer 14

Berry has drawn a distinction between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour. An etic approach looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal. An emic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviour that are specific to that culture.

Berry argues that psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach – arguing that theories, models, concepts, etc., are universal, when they came about through emic research inside a single culture. The suggestion is that psychologists should be much 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

Question 15

What is ‘imposed etic’?

Answer 15

When an observer attempts to generalize observations from one culture to another.

Question 16

What is an example of imposed etic in pscyhological research?

Answer 16

Ainsworth and Bell’s research is an example of an imposed etic – they studied behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed their ideal attachment type could be applied universally. Another example of an imposed etic can be considered in relation to how we define abnormality

Question 17

Evaluation - classic studies

Answer 17

P - One limitation is that many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally biased.

E - Cultural bias is a feature of many classic studies of social influence. For example, both Asch’s and Milgram’s original studies were conducted exclusively with US participants (most of whom were white, middle-class students). Replications of these studies in different countries produced rather different results. For instance, Asch-type experiments in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the US, an individualist culture (e.g., Smith and Bond).

E - This suggests our understanding of topics such as social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures.

Question 18

Evaluation - classic studies counterpoint

Answer 18

However, in an age of increased media globalisation, it is argued that the individualist-collectivist distinction no longer applies. The traditional argument is that individualist countries (such as the US) value individuals and independence, whilst collectivist cultures/countries (such as India and China) value society and the needs of the group. However, Takano and Osaka found that 14 out of 15 studies that compared the US and Japan found no evidence of individualism or collectivism – describing the distinction as lazy and simplistic. This suggests that cultural bias in research may be less of an issue in more recent psychological research.

Question 19

Evaluation - cultural psychology

Answer 19

P – One strength is the emergence of cultural psychology

E – Cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. This is an emerging field and incorporates work from researchers in other disciplines including anthropology, sociology and political science. Cultural psychologists strive 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 with maybe eight or more countries/cultures.

E – This suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it

Question 20

Evaluation - ethnic stereotyping

Answer 20

P – One limitation of cultural bias in psychology is it has led to prejudice against groups of people. E – Jay Gould explained how the first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in the US. Psychologists used the opportunity of World War 1 to pilot their first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Many of the items on the test were ethnocentric, for example assuming everyone would know the names of the US presidents. The result was that recruits from south-eastern Europe and African Americans received the lowest scores. The poor performance of these groups was not taken as a sign of the test’s inadequacy but was instead used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular cultural and ethnic groups. Ethnic minorities were deemed ‘mentally unfit’ and ‘feeble minded’ in comparison to the white majority and were denied educational and professional opportunities as a result.

E – This illustrated how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain cultural and ethnic groups