Issues and debates: culture and gender (cog)

Question 1

INTRO

Culture and Gender Bias

Answer 1

Culture and gender significantly impact psychological research. Studies often assume males and females are similar, and that American participants are representative of all cultures.

Cultural Bias:
- Emic: Behaviour unique to specific cultures (e.g., collectivist vs individualist).
- Etic: Behaviour assumed to be universal across cultures.

Gender Bias:
- Alpha: Exaggerating differences between genders, often devaluing women.
- Beta: Minimising differences, generalising male findings to females (androcentrism).

Question 2

A03 (aren’t issues, gender)

Answer 2

A01:
- Cognitive approach suggests that functions such as memory are both gender and culturally universal. For example, the MSM is based on an information processing approach, not affected by cultural or gender differences.

A03:
Baddeley
- acounstically encoded in STM, semantically encoded in LTM
- recalling acoustically similar words from a list was worse than acoustically dissimilar for male and and female

Question 3

A03 (are issues culture)

Answer 3

A01
- However, Bartlett suggested that memory is affected by cultural experience and gender as he suggested that we reconstruct our memories of events based on our schemas which are determined by our prior experiences and learning.

A03
Bartlett:
- war of the ghosts story, reconstructive memory states that schemas are affected by the culture people come from
- e.g. an english person picturing a rocky beach compared to spanish person picturing sandy beach because of how they grew up