Issues and debates Flashcards
What is gender bias?
The differential treatment or representation of men and women based on stereotypes rather than real differences
What is beta bias? ( a culture bias)
Theories that minimise sex differences and all are assumed to be the same, resulting in universal research designs and conclusions.
What is alpha bias? (a culture bias)
Exaggerates gender differences between males and females
What is cultural bias?
Refers to a tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena through the lens of one culture. judge people in terms of ones own cultural assumptions
What is ethnocentrism?
SEEING THE WORLD ONLY FROM ONES OWN CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE AND BELIEVING THAT THIS ONE PPERSPECTIVE IS BOTH NORMAL AND CORRECT
What is cultural relativism?
Insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken into consideration
What is an example of ethnocentric research?
- Ainworth’s strange situation
- Developed to assess attachment types and many researchers assume that is has the same meaning for the infants from other cultures as it does for American children
Example of cultural relativism?
The meaning of intelligence is difference in every culture.
E.g.
Sternberg pointed out that coordination skills may be essential to life in a preliterate society may be mostly irrelevant to intelligent behaviour for most people in a literate
Explain what is meant by cultural relativism
What is free will?
The notion that humans can make choices and their behaviour/thoughts are not determined by biological or external factors.
What is determinism?
Opposite of free will and states that free will has no place in explaining behaviour
- Hard and soft versions
What is an example of the influence of nurture?
The philosopher John Locke described the newborn infant as a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience is written. This was the view adopted by the behaviourists
What are some examples of influence of nurture?
- Skinners behaviourist approach
- banduras social learning theory
What are some examples of influence of nature?
- Genetic explanations:
- Evoluntionary explanations:
Reductionism?
breaking the complex phenomena into more simple components
what does the reductionist approach suggest?
reductionist approach suggests explanations begin at the highest level (more holistic multivariable level) and then look at fundamental components elements
types of reductionism
biological behaviour:
experimental: multi store model of memory
holism?
perceiving the whole experience rather than the individual components and the relations between them
