Issues and Debates Flashcards
Culture bias
The tendency to judge people in terms of their own cultural assumptions.
Culture - Emic constructs
Are specific to a given culture and vary from one culture to another, look at behaviour from the inside of the cultural system.
Culture - Etic constructs
Analyses of behaviour focuses on the universal of human behaviour, universal factors that hold across all cultures. Looking at behaviour from outside of the culture.
Culture - Ethnocentrism
Belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic and cultural group. Our own cultural perspective is taken as a standard by which we measure other cultures.
Culture
The beliefs and customs that a group of people share, such as child-rearing practices.
Cultural relativism
Behaviour cannot be judged properly unless it is viewed in the context of the culture in which it originates.
Culture - DSM specific example: depression
> Cross-cultural research substantial variations in depressive experience and disorder.
Different cultural and historical traditions frame depressive experience and disorders. In some cultures, depression may be experienced largely in somatic terms rather than with sadness or guilt.
Complaints of nerves and headaches (in Latino and Mediterranean cultures)
Weakness, tiredness, or imbalance (in Chinese and Asian cultures)
Culture - Ainsworth’s strange situation
> Conducted in America, tested children’s anxiety on separation from a primary caregiver.
Ideal attachment type was secure in which the infant displayed moderate levels of anxiety when separated with a primary caregiver.
However differences in child-rearing strategies were debated.
Culture - Yerkes IQ test
IQ tests in America devised for the military showed lower IQ scores for eastern European immigrants who had gone to America to join the army.
Culture - Milgram
> Study of American males, 65% of participants administered a full scale of electric shocks
Claimed that such high levels of obedience were due to ‘the power of the social situation’.
There may be many factors, specific to America, which may have resulted in such findings
Culture - Margaret Mead and the Samoa
> ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ - based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls in the Samoan islands
Details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theories that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
Years of ongoing debate and on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.
Gender - Universability
Any underlying characteristic of human beings that is capable of being applied to all, despite differences of experience and upbringing. Gender bias and culture bias threaten the universality of findings in psychology.
Gender bias
Tendency to treat one sex in a different way from the other.
Gender - Androcentrism
Male-centered; when ‘normal’ behaviour is judged according to male standards.
Gender - Alpha bias
Psychological theories that suggest that there are real and enduring differences between men and women. These may enhance or undervalue members of either sex, but typically undervalue females.
Gender - Beta bias
Theories that ignore or minimise the differences between the sexes.
Gender - Freud’s psychosexual stages
> Male bias,
Horney- makes much more sense for a woman to envy men because of their social status.
Freud - femininity as failed masculinity. Women have a deficiency due to the absence of a penis. Women inferior due to want for a penis and iability to undergo oedipus complex (where superego is formed)
Gender - Kitzinger 1998
> Questions about sex differences aren’t just scientific questions they’re also political. Gender differences distorted to maintain the status quo of male power.
Women kept out of male dominant universities
Women were oppressed
Women stereotypes (Bowlby)
Gender - Tavris 1993
Judgements about an individual woman’s ability are made on the basis of average differences between the sexes or biased sex-role stereotypes, and this also had the effect of lowering women’s self esteem; making them, rather than men, think that they have to improve themselves
Gender - Kohlberg and moral development
Based his stages of moral development around male moral reasoning.
>Had an all-male sample.
>Then generalized these findings to women (beta bias).
>Claimed women generally reached a lower level of moral development (Androcentrism)
Gender - Carol Gilligan vs Kohlberg
> Gilligan highlighted the gender bias in Kohlberg’s work.
Suggested that women make moral decisions differently to men (care ethic vs. justice ethic).
Her research is arguably alpha biased as male and female moral reasoning is more similar than what is suggested in her work.
Gender - Biomedical theories of Abnormality
Mental illness in women, especially depression, is much more likely to be explained in terms of neurochemical/hormonal processes rather than other possible explanations.
Gender - Institutional sexism
> Female psychology students outnumber male but at a senior teaching and research level in universities men dominate.
Research agendas follow male concerns and female concerns may be marginalised or ignored.
Gender - Use of Standardised Procedures in Research Studies
Most experimental methodologies are based around standardised treatment of participants. This assumes that men and women respond in the same ways to the experimental situation.
>Women and men might respond differently to research situations.
>Women and men might be treated differently by researchers.
>Could create artificial differences or mask real ones.
Gender - Dissemination of research results through academic journals
> Publishing bias towards positive results.
Research that finds gender differences more likely to get published than that which doesn’t.
Exaggerates extent of gender differences.
Gender - Essentialism 1
Gender difference is inevitable and ‘fixed’
Walkerdine reports how, in the 1930s, intellectual activity would shrivel a woman’s ovaries and harm her chances of giving birth.
These accounts are usually politically motivated and disguised as biological facts.
Gender - Feminism
Feminist commentators such as Judith Worrell (1992) have put forward a number of criteria that should be adhered to in order to avoid gender bias in research. Women should be studied in real-life contexts and diversity within groups of women should be examined.
Free will
The ability that people have to make their own decisions
