Culture Bias

Culture bias

The tendency to judge people in terms of one’s own cultural assumptions

Cultural relativism

The idea that behaviour can only be meaningfully understood within specific cultural contexts

Ethnocentrism

• judging other cultures by the standards and values of our own culture

• Researchers may assume their own culture's behaviour is 'correct' or 'normal' and when other cultures are observed to differ from the researcher's own, they may be regarded in a negative light, e.g. 'primitive', 'unsophisticated' etc

• This devalues other cultures and may lead to prejudice, discrimination or racism

Culture bias in Psychology

Culture bias occurs when research and theories conducted or developed in one culture are applied, perhaps inappropriately, to another

• For example many psychological studies are conducted in USA or western Europe and applied universally

• The issue is that psychology often ignores differences between cultures and may result in an imposed etic. This means arguing theories are universal when in fact they came about through research which involves studying one culture only

Example of culture bias in Social Influence

• Studied obedience, conformity and influence of social roles only on American participants

• But concluded that this behaviour was universal human behaviour

• Other cultures may have behaved differently, e.g.

replications of Asch in UK found very little conformity

Example of culture bias in Attachment

• Imposed etic — when strange situation was used in other cultures such as Japan children were judged to be ‘insecure’ despite what is considered secure attachment being different in their culture

• Ethnocentric — judgement of what ‘secure’ attachment behaviour looks like came from an American perspective

Examples of culture bias in Psychopathology: Definitions of abnormality

• To decide whether someone is deviating from social norms, we need to consider the culture they are from. Social norms vary widely across cultures

• What is considered 'adequate' functioning may also vary across cultures

• For example in the UK a woman who didn't leave the house unless accompanied by a male family member would be considered as deviating from social norms or failing to function

• However this would be considered normal in other cultures such as Afghanistan and unaccompanied women would be considered abnormal

Examples of culture bias in Gender

• Most of the research into Gender has been carried out in western cultures. The findings may not apply to other cultures which don't share the same view of binary gender roles (male or female)

• For example in Samoa, fafafine is a third gender with its own gender roles that are different from those of males and females in Samoan culture.

Examples of culture bias in Schizophrenia

• In the UK, people of African or Caribbean descent are more likely to be diagnosed with SZ despite no evidence for genetic vulnerability

• White psychiatrists imposing their etic of 'normal' behaviour are over interpreting behaviour as symptoms of SZ when it is normal in other

cultures

Implications of culturally biased research

• Early use of intelligence tests led to discriminatory social policies in USA

• Psychologists piloted the first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Many of the items on the test were ethnocentric (e.g. naming US presidents)

• African Americans and those from South-Eastern Europe received the lowest scores

• • This matters because it was used to justify racist views on the inferiority of particular ethnic groups and impacted on education/professional opportunities

Reducing culture bias

• Do not attempt to extrapolate findings or theories to cultures that are not represented in the research sample and don't assume universal norms across different cultures.

• Use researchers who are native to the culture being investigated

• Take a reflexive approach by constantly reflecting on own biases when carrying out research

There has also been some progress in reducing culture bias in the field of diagnosing mental disorders

DSM-5 also includes culture bound syndromes. These are patterns of symptoms that are specific to a particular culture

• An example is Taijin Kyofusho in Japan and Korea, where individuals fear that their body odour, eye contact, or facial expressions may offend others, potentially leading to social avoidance

• This differs from Social Anxiety Disorder as defined in the DSM-5.

However some human behaviour is universal

• It is wrong to assume that all behaviour is culturally relative. We can apply universality to some aspects of human behaviour

• For example cross cultural research into human facial expressions concluded that the facial expressions for 6 emotions are the same in all cultures