Gender And Culture In Psychology: Cultural Bias Flashcards
What did Henrich et al do and find?
Reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychologists journals and found 68% of research participants came from the USA and 96% were from industrialised nations.
What did another review find about research participants?
80% of research participants were undergraduates studying psychology.
What do findings from Henrich et al and other reviews suggest?
What we know about human behaviour has a strong cultural bias.
What does Henrich et Al’s term WEIRD describe and stand for?
Describes the group of people most likely to be studied by psychologists - Westernised, Educated, Industrialised, Rich Democracies.
If the norm/ standard for behaviour is set by WEIRD what is behaviour of people who aren’t from this type of society?
Seen as abnormal, inferior or unusual.
What does ethnocentrism mean?
A belief in the superiority of ones own cultural group.
What is an example of ethnocentric research?
- Ainsworth’s strange situation.
- Reflects only the norms and values of ‘western culture’.
- Researched attachment types suggesting the ideal attachments was characterised by babies showing moderate amounts of distress when left alone by their mother-figure.
- This led to misinterpretation of child-rearing practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American norm.
- E.g. Japanese infants more likely to be passed as insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress on separation.
- It is likely findings were due to the fact that Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mother.
What did Berry distinguish between?
Etic and emic approaches.
What does an etic approach look at?
Behaviour from the outside of a given culture and tempts to describe behaviours as universal.
What does an emic approach function from?
Inside a culture and identifies behaviours specific to that culture.
What is Ainsworth and Bell’s research an example of?
Imposed etic - studied behaviour inside one culture and assumed their ideal attachment type could be applied universally.
What is a second example of imposed etic?
Definitions of abnormality.
What does Berry argue psychology has been guilty of?
An imposed etic approach - theories, models, concepts etc are universal when they actually came about through emic research inside a single culture.
What should psychologists be more mindful about?
Cultural relativism of research - the things they discover may only make sense from the perspective of the culture within which they were discovered and being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding culture bias.
Evaluation: the most influential studies in psychology are culturally-biased.
Asch and Milgram’s original studies were conducted exclusively with US ppts and replications of these studies in different countries produced different results. E.g. Asch-type experiments in collectivist cultures found higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the US - individualist culture. This suggests out understanding of topic like social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures.
Evaluation: culture bias may be less of a problem more recently
The traditional argument is that individualist countries values individuals and independence whilst collectivist cultures/ countries value society and the needs of the group. However Takano and Osaka found 14/15 studies that compared to the US and Japan found no evidence of individualism/ collectivism. This suggests cultural bias may be less of an issue in more recent psychological research.
Evaluation: emergence of cultural psychology
According to Cohen cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by cultural experience. This is an emerging field and incorporates work from researchers in other disciplines e.g. anthropology. Cultural psychologists strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture alongside local researchers using culturally based techniques. This suggests modern psychologists are mindful of dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it.
Evaluation: it has led to prejudice against groups of people
Gould explained how the first intelligence tests led to eugenics social policies in the US, psychologists used WW1 to pilot their IQ test on 1.75 million army recruits. Many questions were ethnocentric e.g. assuming everyone would know the names of the first presidents. The results showed recruits from South-Eastern Europe and African-Americans received the lowest scores. The poor performance was used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular cultural and ethnic groups. This illustrates how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain cultural and ethnic groups.
