Culture Bias In Psychology Flashcards
Culture
can be defined as the norms, values, beliefs and patterns of behaviour shared by a group of people.
Cultural bias
is the tendency to judge people in terms of one’s own cultural assumptions – through the lens of one’s own cultural norms and values.
Ethnocentrism
means seeing the world only from one’s own cultural perspective, and believing that this one perspective is both normal and correct. An ethnocentric perspective can also take the stance that one’s own culture is superior to other cultures.
Cultural relativism
The idea that a behaviour can only be properly understood/only has meaning/only makes sense in the context of the norms and values of the society or culture in which it occurs
Universality
When a theory is described as universal, it means that it can apply to all people, irrespective of culture.
Two respectivos when studying behaviour in different culture
Etic approach & Emic approach
Etic approach
Looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe these behaviours as universal
Emic approach
Functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture
Ethnocentrism +
Ethnocentrism means judging other cultures to the norms/standards/values from one’s own cultural perspective, and believing that this one perspective is both normal and correct and perhaps even superior to other cultures. Ethnocentrism is an often inadvertent lack of awareness that other ways of seeing things can be as valid as one’s own. For example, definitions of abnormality vary from culture to culture. Rack (1984) claims that African-Caribbean’s in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ on the basis of behaviour which is perfectly normal in their subculture, and this is due to the ignorance of African-Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists.
Examples of ethnocentric research
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation is another example of ethnocentric research. The Strange Situation was developed to assess attachment types by American psychologist Mary Ainsworth, and many researchers assume that the Strange Situation has the same meaning for the infants from other cultures, as it does for American children. German children, on average, demonstrate a higher rate of insecure-avoidant behaviour. However, it is not the case that German mothers are more insensitive than American mothers. Instead, they value and encourage independent behaviour, and therefore their children react differently in the Strange Situation. Furthermore, Japanese children on average demonstrated a higher rate of insecure-resistant behaviour. This finding implies that Japanese parents are overly protective of their babies which is not the case at all since people in Japan tend to show interdependence towards each other and are encouraged to support and rely on each other! This explains why Japanese children are distressed on separation in the Strange Situation. Therefore The Strange Situation has been described as an imposed etic, which is when a technique or theory is developed in one culture and then imposed on another.
Cultural relativism +
According to this viewpoint, the meaning of intelligence is different in every culture. For example, Sternberg (1985) pointed out that coordination skills that may be essential to life in a preliterate society (e.g., those motor skills required for shooting a bow and arrow) may be mostly irrelevant to what is considered intelligent behaviour for most people in a literate and more “developed” society.
Therefore, any study which draws its sample from only one cultural context (like American college students) and then generalises its findings to all people everywhere, cannot be culturally relative
Disadvantages of culture bias
One problem in psychological research is that many classic studies are culturally biased. For example, many studies in social influence research such as Milgram, Asch and Zimbardo was carried out in the US with American (often male) participants and then findings were being generalised to other cultures. In fact when Asch’s line study was replicated in other cultures such as India and China, it was found that cultures that were collectivist (this means there was more emphasis on the needs of the group rather than the individual in collectivist cultures) tended to show higher rates of conformity than individualistic cultures (this means that there was an emphasis on the needs of the individual rather than the group) such as the UK and France. This means that topics in social influence such as obedience and conformity should only be applied to individualistic cultures and definitely not be seen as universal (applied to all cultures).
Advantages of culture bias
+Although in an age of increased globalisation the individualistic-collectivist distinction between cultures may not apply. In a study by Takano and Osaka (1999), they found that in 14 out of the 15 studies looking at the Japan and the US, the collectivist and individualistic distinction did not apply which suggests that cultural bias in more recent research especially after the millennium may not suffer from cultural bias as previous research did.
+one positive of acknowledging cultural bias in research has encouraged the emergence of cultural psychology. Cultural psychology according to Cohen (2017) can be defined as the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experiences – this is a new field of research and incorporates other fields of research such as anthropology, sociology and political science. Cultural psychology attempts to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach – which is conducting research from inside a culture, alongside local researchers using culturally based techniques. Cross cultural researchers will tend to focus on no more than two cultures rather than on a larger scale of about 8 countries/cultures. This means that researchers can avoid being culturally biased.
+Another positive of cultural bias is techniques used to avoid it. For example, contemporary psychologists are significantly more open-minded and well-travelled than previously, and have an increased understanding of other cultures at both a personal and professional level. For example, international psychology conferences increase the exchange of ideas between psychologists which has helped to reduce ethnocentrism in psychology and enabled a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of cultural relativism.
+It is also important to note that when a theory is described as universal, it means that it can apply to all people, irrespective of gender and culture. However, this also means that it needs to include real differences. With regard to culture, one way to achieve universality would be to employ what Berry (1969) described as a derived etic. This is where a series of emic studies take place in local settings, conducted by local researchers using local techniques. Such studies can build up a picture of human behaviour in a similar way to the ethnographic approach taken by anthropologists. This is the study of different cultures through the use of comparisons, as by making comparisons between cultures we can learn more about a target culture.
