Debates & Issues : Cultural Bias Flashcards
What is Universality?
Traits which are universal mean they are shared by everyone despite gender, age and bias.
What is Cultural Bias?
> This occurs when researchers conduct their research and interpret their findings from their own cultural perspective, leading them to ignore the role of cultural differences.
Cultural bias can undermine claims of universality as these researchers might make a universal claim but fail to take into account cultural context.
When is cultural bias most likely to occur?
> It’s most likely to occur if the researchers are all from one culture or if they hold racist views.
It can also be caused by methodological choices the researcher makes such as selecting a culturally biased sample.
What is Ethnocentrism?
> This is a damaging extension of cultural bias. It occurs when researchers not only study a cultural perspective but they also use their own cultural standards to evaluate behaviour in other cultures.
Undermines claims of universality as these researchers assume their values and norms are universal, when in fact they are culturally specific.
What causes ethnocentrism?
Research is more likely to be ethnocentric if the researchers are all from one culture or if they hold explicitly racist views.
What is cultural relativism?
This is the belief that behaviour cannot be meaningfully understood outside
of the cultural context within which it occurs. This means cultural relativists insist that
researchers take account of cultural context.
> This is a deliberate challenge to universalism as if behaviour can only ever be understood within its specific cultural context then whatever a researcher uncovers cannot be applied outside of that culture.
How does cultural relativism present a challenge to cultural bias?
Since cultural relativists always seek to take account of cultural context, the research is less likely to be biased by their own cultural perspective.
What challenges does cultural relativism present to ethnocentrism?
Cultural relativists do not believe there is a universal right and wrong. This means cultural relativists avoid imposing their own values on another culture.
It has been argued that cultural bias is a widespread problem in psychological research.
For example, Henrich (2010) found that a randomly selected American college student was 4000 times more likely to be a participant in psychological research than a random non Westerner. Clearly, much research has been done into one cultural context, meaning these studies are culturally biased. Moreover, this has implications for the validity of universal claims. Since research findings are overwhelmingly likely to reflect the experience of people from a narrow range of cultural backgrounds, there is good reason to doubt these conclusions reached on the basis of this biased research can be universally true. However, given that this research is a decade old, suggesting a
potential problem with temporal validity. therefore, it cannot be assumed that this culturally
biased approach to sampling is as prevalent today as it was over a decade ago. Furthermore,
even if research today is as narrowly focused on American college students, this may not be as problematic in the globalised modern world. Arguably,cultures are becoming increasingly less distinct. This means that even if research is culturally biased in its sampling, this does not mean its conclusions cannot be generalised to the rest of the world.
Culturally biased and/or ethnocentric research is socially harmful.
For example, in 1917 Robert Yerkes developed an intelligence tests to test US Army recruits. Yerkes’ test judged intelligence using a standard derived from middle-class American culture and its findings were used to show that other cultural groups were inferior — meaning his research was ethnocentric. This ethnocentric research caused lasting social harm, as it fuelled racist sentiment in the
US and was used to justify discriminatory immigration restrictions that lasted into the 1960s.
Importantly, Yerkes’s conclusions were false. Later research revealed how test scores
correlated with length of time in the US. This Illustrates a more general social harm
associated with ethnocentrism: it creates false knowledge, and since genuine knowledge is the basis for social progress, ethnocentrism is socially harmful. However, whether the social harms resulting from ethnocentrism are as damaging today as they were in 1917, when
Yerkes conducted his research is doubtful, given the general acceptance of racism in US society at the time. Nonetheless, this example illustrates the potential damage of
ethnocentrism in research, an example modern researchers today must carefully consider
Although cultural relativism is presented as a solution to the problems of cultural bias and ethnocentrism, an extreme position of cultural relativism may constrain psychological
research
Some cultural relativists have argued that since behaviour can only ever be understood within a specific cultural context, researchers should abandon the search for universals and instead focus only on investigating behaviour within specific cultural contexts. This rejection of universality flies in the face of many well-established findings, such as
the universality of interactional synchrony or the limited capacity of short-term memory.
This perspective even challenges entire psychological approaches. For example, evolutionary
psychology seeks to uncover the universals that developed deep in humanity’s evolutionary
past (e.g., common phobias or sexual behaviors). Consequently, evolutionary psychologists
regard the influence of cultural context to be relatively trivial. Clearly this is not compatible
with an extreme position of cultural relativism, meaning an acceptance of cultural relativism
could put an end to the entire project of evolutionary psychology. In general, though, most researchers reject the extreme position of cultural relativism. They accept that a search for
universals is compatible with a willingness to give due consideration to the importance of
cultural context.
