Culture bias

Question 1

Solution (psychologist are being more open minded and understanding) DW

Answer 1

P: Contemporary psychologists are more open-minded and well- travelled than previously and have an increased understanding of other cultures at both a personal and professional level.
E: They are utilizing more samples of various cultures in meta-analyses and implement disciplines from cultural psychology.
E: This suggests that psychology has the potential to be improved by educating other psychologists as this broadens their perspective decreasing the likelihood that they will adopt an ethnocentric approach, or that their research will lack cultural relativism
I: This has the potential to increases generalisability of psychological reasearch and increase their ecological validity.

Question 2

solution into consequence (not all psychological research is culturally relative) CW

Answer 2

P: Not all psychological research is culturally relative as there are thought to be some universal behaviours.
E: For example, Van Izendoorn and Kroonenburg did a meta-analysis of 32 studies of 8 countries to study whether attachment type is universal . They found that secure attachment was the most common.
c: However, insecure resistant attactment was seen more common in rural areas such as Japan showing variations within one culture. This demonstrates that despite some attachment styles seem universal it is largely dependent on their culture, in this case collectivist culture.

Question 3

solution ( recognising it when it occurs) HB

Answer 3

P: One way to deal with culture bias is to recognise when it occurs.
E: Smith and bond found in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social psychology that the majority of the textbooks were American and only 2% were from the rest of the world
E: This suggests that psychological research is very unrepresentative of other cultures in the world and it needs to be greatly improved by including them and their ideas.

Question 4

consequence (creates or reinforces stereotypes) DW

Answer 4

P: Cultural bias has the capability to create or reinforce stereotypes in society.
E: The US army used an IQ test before WW1 which was culturally biased towards dominant white majority. The test showed that African-Americans were at the bottom of the IQ scale.
E:Therefore, the non-white members of the US army at the time were disadvantaged as their intelligence was made to look inferior due to the IQ test in comparison to their white counterparts.
I: This may have led to discrimination inference about the African American soldier that were intellectually inferior