issues and debates

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

Culture is the set of norms, moral values, behavioural norms, social roles, customs and traditions of a group of people.

Question 2

What reasoning is there for researchers not studying other cultures

Answer 2

-Psychologists may have viewed other non-Western cultures as being ‘primitive’ or not worthy of study- endrocentrism
-Cross-cultural research is expensive, time consuming, and demands many resources
-It could also be that psychologists made the assumption that other cultures were the same as their own
-social inequality- psychology funding mainly goes to upper class western cultures

Question 3

Etic research

Answer 3

Etic research is when research based on one culture is generalised and applied to all cultures.
-trying to create universal laws

Question 4

Etic research strengths

Answer 4

Humans from various cultures have similarities:
-Human physiology is fairly consistent across all cultures.
-Certain behaviours are also universal: language development, aggression levels, and cognitive development.

Question 5

Etic research weaknesses

Answer 5

-researchers can be biased because of imposed Etic
-can’t apply something to the mass majority if you haven’t taken samples from it

Question 6

Emic research

Answer 6

-The results and conclusions drawn from these studies are not to be applied to all cultures as the study is only applied to the behaviour and norms of one culture
-not trying to create universal laws

Question 7

Emic weaknesses

Answer 7

Still bias- This is due to researchers over-emphasising the differences between the cultural groups and not looking at the differences within the cultural groups.
-always going to be individual differences

Question 8

What is universality

Answer 8

Thinking one set of rules/norms/theories can be used to explain everything

Question 9

Sub- culture bias

Answer 9

Sub-culture bias is another form of cultural bias. Within larger groups there are going to be smaller sub-groups which may or may not be represented and instead generalised.

Question 10

Examples of sub-culture groups

Answer 10

examining British culture as a whole, there could be sub-groups of male/female or urban/rural.
If studying people from urban centres (Like London or Manchester), the conclusions might be generalised to all of the UK.
-Etic bias

Question 11

ETHNOCENTRISM

Answer 11

seeing the world only from one’s own cultural perspective and believing that this one
perspective is both normal and correct

Question 12

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Answer 12

insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken into consideration

Question 13

Consequences of cultural bias

Answer 13

-wrongly applied finding

Question 14

Consequences of cultural bias

Answer 14

-wrongly applied finding

Question 15

Reductionism

Answer 15

Explains behaviour as being broken down into smaller, simplistic constituent parts

Question 16

Holism

Answer 16

An approach thst believes human behaviour should be analysed as a whole to examine the influences

Question 17

Example of reductionism

Answer 17

Multi-store model of memory
-breaks down memory into basic functions (recall, rehearse and forgetting) and stores (short term and long term)

Question 18

Reductionism tends to be d….

Answer 18

Deterministic
Researchers look at the cause and effect relationships in behaviour

Question 19

ADV+DISADV for reductionism

Answer 19

ADV- more scientific and testable than other approaches- cause and relationships can be more easily tested through scientific methods
DISADV- experiments can be too simplistic-narrow and can ignore other influences