Culture Bias - Issues and Debates

Question 1

What is culture

Answer 1

• all the knowledge and values shared by a society.

Cultures may differ from one another in many ways, so that the findings of psychological research conducted in one culture may not apply directly to another.

Question 2

Emics

Answer 2

• An emic approach refers to the investigation of a culture from within the culture itself.
• This means that research of European society from a European perspective is emic, and African society by African researchers in Africa is also emic.

Question 3

Positive of emic research

Answer 3

• ecological validity
• as the findings are less likely to be distorted or caused by a mismatch between the cultures of the researchers and the culture being investigated.

Question 4

What is cultural bias

Answer 4

Culture bias can occur when a researcher assumes that an emic construct (behavior specific to a single culture) is actually an etic (behavior universal to all cultures).

Bias can occur when emics and etics get mistaken for each other.

For example, emic constructs are likely to be ignored or misinterpreted as researchers from another culture may not be sensitive to local emics. Their own cultural ‘filters’ may prevent them from detecting them or appreciating their significance.

Question 5

Etics

Answer 5

Therefore, etic constructs are considered universal to all people, and are factors that hold across all cultures (similarities between cultures).

Etic constructs assume that most human behavior is common to humans but that cultural factors influence the development or display of this behavior.

Making the assumption that behaviors are universal across cultures can lead to imposed etics, where a construct from one culture is applied inappropriately to another. For example, although basic human emotional facial expressions are universal there can be subtle cultural variation in these.

Question 6

Ethnocentrism

Answer 6

Ethnocentrism occurs when a researcher assumes that their own culturally specific practices or ideas are ‘natural’ or ‘right’.

When other cultures are observed to differ from the researcher’s own, they may be regarded in a negative light e.g. ‘primitive’, ‘degenerate’, ‘unsophisticated’, ‘undeveloped’ etc.

This becomes racism when other cultures are denigrated or their traditions regarded as irrelevant etc.

The antidote to ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, which is an approach to treating each culture as unique and worthy of study.

Question 7

Cultural relativism

Answer 7

cultural relativism, which is an approach to treating each culture as unique and worthy of study.

Question 8

Culturally bias research

Answer 8

Ainsworth - strange situation

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