Cultural Bias - AO3

Question 1

What are the strengths of cultural bias?

Answer 1

• drawing attention to it has lead to more universal research findings, for example Buss and his co-workers travelled and conducted their study on mate prefrences in 37 different cultures, which this reduces ethnocentrism and increases understanding of cultural relativism
• it means we get a wider understanding of the world around us this is because it causes the developemenrt of more emic approaches like indigenous psychologies

Question 2

Describe what indigenous psychologies are.

Answer 2

• it’s the development of different groups in different countries
• for example, Afrocentrism suggests that in order to develope theories about black people, the theory should be African-centred as that’s where their roots are

Question 3

What are the weaknesses of cultural bias?

Answer 3

• there are negative consequences. for example the US army IQ test used in WW1 showed that european immigrants fell below white americans and african-americans even lower than that. this caused racist steriotypes to form
• research methods are also effected as shown by Henrich et al who found that 67% of participants were american and randomly selected american students were 4000x more likely to be in a study than a randomly selected non-western student