cultural bias - issues and debates

Culture bias - what is it + ethnocentrism (limitation)

• act of interpreting and judging behaviour and psychological characteristics of one culture by holding them to the standards of your own

• Ethnocentrism - the view that our own culture should be the basis for judgements of other groups. The views, beliefs and cultures of our own group are ‘normal’ or superior and those of other groups are strange. Limitation: limits validity of theories and neglects important cross cultural differences e.g when assumptions about one’s culture are considered generalisable to other cultures

• Etic way of researching seem to amplify or reduce cultural bias w/ examples

• Etic approach amplifies cultural bias

• etic : type of approach seeks to develop universal, nomothetic theories about human nature and behaviour that span all cultures

• Imposed etic: refers to the use of a measure e.g DSM which has been developed according to the values of one culture and used to make assessments in that culture - then used to study or judge behaviour in another culture w alternative cultural reference points.

• E.g Ainsworth’s strange situation: German children on average demonstrates a higher rate of insecure avoidant behaviour but not the case that German mothers are more incentive than American mothers - they value and encourage independent behaviour.

• Rack claims African Caribbeans in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill on the basis of behaviour perfectly normal in their culture = due to the ignorance of African Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists

Emic approach - what it is, limitation

• one way to overcome cultural bias is to employ an emic approach

• Where one culture is studied in order to discover culture specific behaviour and will only generalise their findings to the culture they have been studying - do not try to generalise to everyone

• Limitation: hard to get a true understanding of the culture if you’re not a member of it, especially when carrying out experiments where there’s limited contact and small samples

Cultural relativism - what is it

• principle of regarding the beliefs, values and practises of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself

• Sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research, as well as to avoid judging another culture by the standards of ones own culture = considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism

Ao3 of ethnocentrism leading to indigenous psychologies

• (development of different groups of theories in different countries)

• Afrocentrism: movement whose central proposition is that all black people have their roots in Africa and that psychological theories concerning such people must therefore be African centred and must express African values.

• Approach suggests values and cultures of Europeans at worst devalue non European people = and at best are irrelevant to the life and culture of people of African descent

• Indigenous psychologies can help reduce cultural bias

Ao3 of cultural bias - can be immensely damaging , theories suffering culture biases = negative effect on society

• e.g Yerkes’ skewed intelligence test inaccurately measured African American’s intelligence as much lower due to the biases test favouring white participants = limited opportunities during ww1

• These theories may inappropriately affect minorities and create unfair stereotypes like low IQ. As a result many theories that fail to include a cultural impact on society = socially sensitive

• More work to be done to ensure theories consider their societal impact before being published