Cultural Bias - AO1

Question 1

What is cultural bias?

Answer 1

the tendency to judge all people in terms of your own cultural assumptions, which causes your judgement to be distorted

Question 2

What is culture?

Answer 2

knowlege and values shared as a society

Question 3

What is alpha cultural bias?

Answer 3

theories that assume there as real differences between cultural groups

Question 4

What is an example of alpha cultural bias?

Answer 4

• is the idea that individualist cultures are less likely to conform than collectivist cultures (like japan)
• This is shown to be incorrect by Osaka et al’s research where they reviewed 15 studies that discussed this and found 14/15 of the studies shown no to little difference between individualist and collectivist culture’s levels of conformity

Question 5

What is beta cultural bias?

Answer 5

theories that ignore the differences between cultures

Question 6

What is an example of beta cultural bias?

Answer 6

• in intelligence testing the tests are made by western psychologists
• as a result of that non-western people may appear less intelligent
• this is an example of imposed etic

Question 7

What is imposed etic?

Answer 7

it’s when a developement of one group is imposed by another one

Question 8

What does ethocentism does?

Answer 8

• it means seeing the world from only one cultural perspective and believing that it’s normal and correct
• this causes exaggerated view of the differences between cultures, thus distoriting the views

Question 9

What is an example of ethnocentrism?

Answer 9

• The Strange Situation
• from the test you may come to negative conclusions about the child rearring practices in Japan (a collectivist culture) as most of the children develope insecure attachments

Question 10

What is cultural relativism?

Answer 10

the view that behaviour can’t be judged properly unless it’s viewed in the culture it origniates in

Question 11

What study shows cultural relativism?

Answer 11

Mead’s study

Question 12

Explain Mead’s study.

Answer 12

• she observed social groups in Papua New Guinea
• in these observations she found that gender roles are determined by cultural experiences and not biological constructs
• later her views changed and she said that men are aggressive in all cultures so behaviours are unviversal however, the degree of aggression is determined by culture