Gender and Culture in Psychology: Culture Bias

  • Universality and Bias
  • ethnocentrism
  • Cultural relativism
  • Evaluation
  • similar issue to gender bias also arises with respect to culture.
  • Joseph Henrich et al. 2010 reviewed hundred of studies in leading psychology journals & found
  • 68% of research ppts came from US,
  • 96% from industrialised nations.
  • another review found that 80% of research ppts were undergrads studying psychology (Arnett 2008)

Participants = Westernised Educated Industrialised Rich Democracies (W.E.I.R.D)

  • if norm/standard for a particular behaviour is set by WEIRD people, then behaviour from non-westernised, less educated, agricultural and poorer cultures are inevitably seen as 'abnormal', inferior' or 'unusal'
  • Cultural Bias = a tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena through the lens of one's own culture.

~ ignores the effects that cultural differences have on behaviour

ethnocentrism = the term used to describe the 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

Etic Construct = 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

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 = 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.

  • ethnocentrism refers to a particular form of cultural bias & is a belief in the superiority of one's own cultural group
  • Ainsworth and Bell's (1970) Strange situation is an example of this, criticised as reflecting only the norms and values of what is sometimes called 'western culture'.
  • they conducted research on attachment type, suggesting that 'ideal' attachment was characterised by the babies showing moderates amounts of distress when left alone by their mother-figure (typical of secure-attachment).
  • this however lead to misinterpretation of child rearing-practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American ' norm'.
  • e.g. Japanese infants were much more likely to be classed as insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress on separation (Takahashi 1986). it's likely that this finding was die to fat that Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mother.
  • John Berry 1969 has drawn a distinction between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour
  • etic approach looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal
  • emic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture
  • Ainsworth and Bells' research = imposed etic - they studies behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed their ideal attachment type (and the method for assessing it) could be applied universally.
  • another example of an imposed etic can be considered in relation to how we define abnormality.
  • Berry argues psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach - arguing that theories, models, concepts etc., are universal when they actually came about through emic research inside a single culture.

-suggestion = psychologist should be more mindful of the cultural relativism of their research. - that the 'things; they discover may only make sense from the perspective of the culture within which they were discovered - an being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding cultural bias in research

  • classic studies
  • P: a lot of influential, classic studies are cultural-biased
  • E: cultural bias is a feature of many classical studies of social influence. e.g. Asch's and Milgram's original studies were conducted with US ppts (most middle-class, white students). replication of these studies in different cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the US, and individualist culture (e.g. Smith and Bond 1993)
  • E: weakness - suggests our understanding of topics such as social influence should only be applied to individualist cultures.
  • cultural psychology
  • P: cultural psychology according to Cohen (2017) is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. It's an emerging field and incorporates work for researchers in other disciplines including anthropology, sociology and political science.
  • E: cultural psychologists strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking emic approach and conducting research from inside culture often the alongside local researchers using culturally based techniques. Cross-culture research tends focus on just two cultures instead of larger scale studies with maybe eight or more countries/cultures.
  • E: strength - suggests modern psychologists are mindful of dangers of culture bias and are taking steps to avoid it.
  • ethnic stereotyping
  • P: cultural bias in psych has led to prejudice against groups of people
  • E: Gould (1981) explained how first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in US. psychologists use opportunity of WW1 to pilot their first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. many items on test were ethnocentric, e.g. assuming everyone would know names of US presidents. result = recruits from south-eastern europe and african-american received lowest scores. poor performance of these groups wasn't taken as sign of test's inadequacy but instead used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of specific cultural and ethnic groups. ethnic minorities were deemed 'mentally unfit' and 'feeble-minded' in comparison to white majority & were denied educational and professional opportunities as result.
  • E: weakness - illustrates how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain cultural and ethnic groups.
  • counterpoint
  • P: argued that in age of increased media globalisation, individualist-collectivist distinction no longer applies
  • E: traditional argument = individualist countries (e.g.US) value individuals & independence whilst collectivist cultures/countries (e.g. India, china) value society and the needs of the group. however, Takano and Osaka (1999) found 14/15 studies comparing US and Japan and found no evidence of individualism or collectivism - describing the distinction as lazy and simplistic.
  • E: strength - suggests cultural bias in research may be less of an issues in more recent psych research