cultural bias

Question 1

what are the strengths of cultural bias?

Answer 1

1. one benefit of the awareness of cultural bias has been the emergence of cultural psychology
   - strives to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach
   -leads them to study with local researchers and using culturally based techniques
   - awareness has meant being conscious of context of research and improvements - cultural relativism
2. can be argued that the individualism-collectivism distinct no long applies now
   - showed that 14 out of 15 studies that compared the US and Japan found no evidence of collectivism or individualism
   - suggests cultural bias may be less of an issue in recent research

Question 2

what are the weaknesses of cultural bias?

Answer 2

2. many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally biased
   - cultural bias is a problem in many studies of social influence
   - for example, Asch and Milgram conducted their studies on exclusively US white participants
   -replications of these studies produced different results to the original as Smith and Bond showed how collectivist culture has higher rates of conformity in Asch-type experiments
   -suggests our understanding on topics like social influence should only be applied to the culture that were studied in
3. cultural bias has had real life impact against different groups of people
   -has led to prejudice and the support of eugenics
   -for example, psychologists introduced the first IQ tests during WW1 to army recruits in the US
   - many elements of the test were ethnocentric and based on Western culture resulting in African Americans and south-eastern European getting the lowest scores
   -used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of these ethnic groups and consequently denied educational and professional opportunities
   -shows how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain minority groups