Issues and Debates Notes

Gender Bias

• Gender bias is the differential treatment or representation of men and women based on stereotypes rather than real differences.

• Alpha Bias: This exaggerates differences between men and women, suggesting real and enduring distinctions, but often devalues one gender (typically women).

  • Examples:

    • Psychodynamic explanations of offending: Freud suggested that females are less moral due to not experiencing castration anxiety, which Hoffman et al. refuted.

    • Wilson’s sociobiological theory of relationships: Claims that male promiscuity is genetic, while female promiscuity is against their nature due to limited eggs and high reproductive costs. This can lead to prejudice.

    • Schizophrenia diagnosis: Historically more frequent in men since the 1980s, possibly due to women masking symptoms by maintaining relationships and work, as Cotton et al. suggest.

• Androcentrism: This is a consequence of beta bias, where behaviour is compared to a 'male' standard, neglecting or excluding women.

  • Example: PMS is sometimes seen as a social construct that trivialises female emotion, while male anger is viewed as a logical response to external pressures (Brescoll & Uhlman).

  • Androcentrism minimises differences, assuming what's true for men is true for women.

  • Fight or Flight research: Initially conducted on male animals due to hormonal variations in females, generalising results until Shelley Taylor (2000) found that females use a 'tend and befriend' response to ensure offspring survival, indicating that beta bias ignored a real difference.

• Beta Bias: This ignores or minimises differences between men and women, assuming insights from male studies apply to women equally.

  • Examples:

    • Fight or Flight response research: Early studies used only male lab mice due to fewer hormonal fluctuations, but results were generalised to females, ignoring sex differences.

    • Kohlberg's Moral Reasoning Theory: Developed by studying American males and generalising results to both genders.

• Universality: This aims to develop theories applicable to all people, including real differences. Bias reduces the universality of psychological findings.

• Evaluation:

  • Feminist psychology argues that difference psychology stems from biological explanations and that social stereotypes greatly contribute to perceived differences. Feminist views can counter androcentrism. Eagly (1978) suggested using knowledge of gender differences to develop training programs for women leaders.

  • Bias in research methods: Rosenthal (1966) found male experimenters more encouraging to female participants, affecting performance. Fewer women in senior research roles also means female concerns are less reflected in research.

  • Laboratory experiments might institutionalise sexism, as male researchers could view women as unable to complete complex tasks (Nicolson, 1995). Eagly and Johnson found more similar leadership styles in real settings than in labs, suggesting higher ecological validity in field studies.

  • Reverse alpha bias: Research that emphasises women's strengths, challenging preconceptions. Cornwell et al. (2013) found that women learn better due to attentiveness and organisation, challenging stereotypes.

  • Avoiding beta bias: While beta bias has increased opportunities for women, Hare, Mustin, and Marecek noted that arguing for equality can overlook women’s special needs, like the biological demands of pregnancy.

  • Assumptions need to be challenged: Darwin's sexual selection theory portrays women as choosy and men as competitive, but this has been challenged by findings that women are equally competitive and that mating with multiple partners can be an adaptive strategy (Vernimmen, 2015). DNA evidence supports female competition.

Cultural Bias

• Culture: This includes rules, customs, morals, and ways of interacting that bind a society together.

• Cultural Bias: This is the tendency to judge cultures based on your own cultural assumptions, distorting judgments.

• Cultural Relativism: The view that behaviours should be understood within the context of their culture of origin.

  • Example: Milgram’s obedience study replicated in Spain (Miranda et al. found over 90% obedience) and Australia (Kilham & Mann found only 16% of females obeyed to the highest voltage), suggesting the original findings were specific to American culture.

• Alpha Bias: Cultural relativism can lead to an alpha bias, where the assumption of real differences leads psychologists to overlook universals.

• Beta Bias: Cultural relativism is often discussed in defining mental disorder. Behaviours infrequent in one culture may be common in another (e.g., hearing voices being a sign of spirituality in African cultures). Assuming universal rules might misdiagnose individuals.

• Alpha and Beta Bias in Cross-Cultural Research:

  • Alpha bias refers to the assumption that there are real differences between cultural groups. The distinction between individualistic and collectivist cultures is one example. Takano and Osaka reviewed 15 studies comparing the US and Japan and found that most did not support the view that there are differences in conformity.

  • Beta Bias refers to theories that minimise or ignore cultural differences. An example of this is using IQ tests. Psychologists use IQ tests to study intelligence in many different cultures, as they assume that their view of intelligence applies equally to all cultures.

• Ethnocentrism: This is an example of alpha bias that leads to beta bias. It involves seeing things from the viewpoint of your own social group and evaluating others using the standards of your own culture. In its extreme form, ethnocentrism can lead to prejudice against other cultures.

• Indigenous Psychologies: These involve the development of different groups of theories in different countries as a method of countering ethnocentrism.

• Example of Ethnocentrism: Ainsworth’s Strange Situation suggested that secure attachment was characterised by moderate separation and stranger anxiety. Therefore, German mothers, whose children showed little separation and stranger anxiety (thus being insecure-avoidant), were deemed as cold and rejecting.

• The emic-etic distinction: The emic approach emphasises the uniqueness of every culture, but its findings are only significant for that culture. The etic approach seeks universal aspects of behaviour. Using indigenous researchers in each cultural setting is one way to avoid cultural bias.

• Evaluation:

  • Bias in research methods: Smith and Bond surveyed research in a European textbook on social psychology and found that 66% of the studies were American, 32% European, and 2% from the rest of the world. This suggests an institutionalised cultural bias in psychology.

  • Consequences of cultural bias: US Army IQ tests showed European immigrants scoring slightly below white Americans, leading to stereotyping and discrimination.

  • Not all behaviours are affected by cultural bias: Ekman et al. demonstrated that facial expressions for anger, guilt, and disgust were universally recognised across cultures. Interactional synchrony and reciprocity are universal features of infant-caregiver interactions. Understanding behaviour requires looking at both universal and culture-bound examples.

  • Worldwide psychology: Increased researcher travel and international conferences reduce ethnocentrism by appreciating cultural differences. Bond and Smith noted that some cultures may be unfamiliar with research traditions, leading to a ‘Please-U’ demand characteristic effect.

Free Will and Determinism

• Determinism: The belief that behaviour is controlled by internal or external factors beyond individual control.

  • Biological determinism: Behaviour is caused by internal biological forces like genes. For example, the IGF2R gene is linked to high intelligence (Hill et al., 1999), and CDH-13 and MAOA genes are candidate genes for criminality.

  • Environmental determinism: Behaviour is caused by previous experience through classical and operant conditioning (e.g., phobias from conditioning, Skinner's Box). These are external forces beyond our control.

  • Psychic determinism: Freud’s theory suggests adult behaviour is determined by innate drives and early experiences, leading to unconscious conflicts (e.g., fixation at psychosexual stages).

• Free Will: Each individual can make choices about their behaviour, without being determined by internal or external forces. This is a common feature of the humanistic approach.

• Hard Determinism: All behaviour can be predicted by internal and external forces, so there is no free will.

• Soft Determinism: A version of determinism that allows for some free will and suggests that all events, including human behaviour, have a cause. For example, the cognitive approach suggests that individuals can reason and make decisions within the limits of their cognitive system.

• The importance of scientific research: Scientific research assumes all events have a cause. Independent variables are manipulated to affect dependent variables, establishing cause-and-effect relationships. This increases the scientific credibility of psychology.

• Evaluation of determinism:

  • 100% genetic determinism is unlikely: Twin studies show 80% similarity in intelligence and 40% in depression for monozygotic twins, suggesting an interactionist standpoint. Higher concordance rates in MZ twins may be due to shared environments.

  • Determinism simplifies human behaviour: Human behaviour is less rigid and influenced by cognitive factors. Aggression cannot be simplified to the actions of the endocrine system and adrenaline.

  • Determinism may be used to justify crimes: This is not in line with the judicial system, which holds individuals morally responsible. Determinism has led to treatments like SSRIs for depression, but may neglect non-biological treatments such as CBT.

• Free Will

  • The Humanistic Approach: Humanistic psychologists argue that self-determination is necessary for human behaviour. Rogers (1959) claimed that being controlled by others prevents an individual from taking responsibility and changing. Self-responsibility enables personal growth or ‘self-actualisation’.

  • Moral responsibility: Individuals are in charge of their own actions. The law states that children and those who are mentally ill do not have this responsibility, but other than this, there is an assumption that normal adult behaviour is self-determined.

• Evaluation of free will:

  • Illusion of free will: Choices may be determined by previous reinforcement, as suggested by behaviourism.

  • Challenge to the idea of free will: Libet et al (1983) recorded brain activity before conscious awareness of movement. Soon et al (2008) found prefrontal cortex activity up to 10 seconds before awareness. This suggests behaviour is pre-determined.

  • Free will has good face validity: We appear to make our own decisions in everyday scenarios.

  • Free will has high internal validity: Robert et al. found that adolescents with an internal locus of control are less likely to develop depression and are more likely to have better mental health.

The Nature–Nurture Debate

• Environment: Everything outside our body, including people, events, and the physical world. Any non-genetic influence on behaviour.

  • Lerner identified different levels of the environment, ranging from pre-natal experiences (e.g., the mother’s physiological and psychological state during pregnancy) to post-natal experiences (e.g., the socio-historical context within which the child grew up).

  • The view that the mind is a ‘blank slate upon which experience writes’ is typical of an empiricist/behaviourist approach, e.g. John Locke.

• Nature: Any genetic influence on behaviour (e.g., genes, neurochemistry, neurotransmitters).

• Heredity: The process by which traits are passed from parents to offspring, usually referring to genetic inheritance. The heritability coefficient quantifies the genetic basis of a characteristic. Intelligence has a heritability coefficient of 0.5 (Plomin et al., 1994), indicating equal influences of nature and nurture.

• Interactionist approach: Nature and nurture work together rather than in opposition.

• Nature - Nurture Debate: The argument as to whether a person’s development is mainly due to their genes or to environmental influences. Most researchers accept that behaviour is a product of the interaction between nature and nurture.

• Examples of the influence of nature:

  • Genetic explanations: More closely related individuals are more likely to develop the same behaviours. The concordance rate for schizophrenia is 40% for MZ twins and 7% for DZ twins.

  • Evolutionary explanations: Behaviours that promote survival are naturally selected. Bowlby proposed that attachment was adaptive because infants were more likely to be protected and survive.

• Examples of the influence of nurture:

  • Behaviourism: All behaviour can be explained by experience alone. Skinner explained learning through classical and operant conditioning.

  • Social learning theory: Bandura proposed that behaviour is acquired indirectly through operant and classical conditioning, but also by directly through vicarious reinforcement. Biology has a role to play, e.g. the urge to act aggressively could be biological, but the way a person learns to express anger is through environmental influences

  • Other explanations: The double-bind theory of schizophrenia suggests that schizophrenia develops in children who frequently receive contradictory messages from parents.

• Evaluation of the nature-nurture debate:

  • Diathesis-Stress Model: A diathesis is a biological vulnerability. The expression of the gene depends on experience in the form of a stressor, which triggers the condition. Tienari et al (2004) found that children with a genetic risk for schizophrenia were more likely to develop it if raised in a family environment with tension and a lack of empathy.

  • Nurture affects nature: Maguire et al.'s study of London taxi drivers showed that the region of their brains with spatial memory was bigger than in controls. Maguire et al. studied the brains of London taxi drivers and found a larger grey matter volume in the mid-posterior hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with spatial awareness. This demonstrates the interactionist nature of empiricism and nativism and gives further reason as to why the influences of the two cannot be separated.

  • Epigenetics: Refers to the material in each cell that acts like a switch to turn genes on or off. Life experiences control these switches, and these switches are passed on when the DNA is replicated semi-conservatively. Caspi et al (2002) found that men with less MAOA gene expression who experienced maltreatment were responsible for 44% of crimes. This brings a third element into the nature-nurture debate: the experiences of previous generations!

  • Constructivism: Plomin suggested that an individual’s ‘nature’ would determine their ‘nurture’ through niche-picking or niche-building. Constructivism further emphasises the multi-layered relationship between nature and nurture.

Holism and Reductionism

• Holism: Perceiving the whole experience rather than individual features or relations between them.

• Reductionism: Breaking complex phenomena into simpler components, implying that this is desirable.

• Levels of explanation: Different ways of viewing the same phenomena in Psychology (socio-cultural, psychological, physical, physiological, neurochemical).
  Lowest Level Biological Explanations

• Highest level: Cultural and social explanations of behaviour.

• Middle level: Psychological explanations of behaviour.

• Lower level: Biological explanations of behaviour.

• Types of Reductionism:

  • Biological reductionism: Reducing behaviour to biology, as it is based on the premise that we are biological organisms. A characteristic feature of the biological approach.

  • Environmental reductionism: Behaviourist explanations suggest that all behaviour can be explained in terms of simple stimulus-response links

• Evaluation of Holism:

  • Provides a more complete picture: Some examples of behaviour can only be understood at the holistic level

  • However, it is difficult to investigate the many differing types and levels of explanations. This poses a practical problem for researchers who attempt to combine many higher-level explanations.

  • More hypothetical and not based on empirical evidence: Holistic explanations are frequently used by the humanistic approach.

• Evaluation of reductionism:

  • Consistent with the scientific approach: Scientific psychology aims to be able to predict and control behaviour.

  • Practical application in the development of drug therapy: A reductionist approach towards researching and explaining mental disorders has led to the development of powerful and effective drug therapies

  • Ignores the complexity of behaviour: Reductionist explanations may lead to a loss of validity because they ignore the social context where behaviour occurs, which often gives behaviour its meaning.

Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches to Psychological Investigation

• Idiographic approach: A method of investigating behaviour focusing on individuals and their uniqueness. Subjective and rich human experience is used to explain behaviour, without developing general principles.

  • Associated with methods that produce qualitative data

  • An example is the study of HM and KF, where the idiographic approach was used in the form of case studies, and informed further research into the different types of long-term memory.

• Examples of the Idiographic Approach:

  • The psychodynamic approach: Freud used case studies and in-depth interviews to collect qualitative data from Little Hans.

  • The humanistic approach adopts a holistic and ‘phenomenological’ approach to research, which focuses on the experience of the individual.

• Nomothetic approach: Seeks to formulate general laws of behaviour based on the study of groups and the use of statistical, quantitative techniques.

• Examples of the Nomothetic Approach:

  • Behaviourists explain all behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response links which have been learnt through experience

  • The cognitive approach uses objective methods of measuring brain activity, such as EEG and PET scans.

  • The biological approach also makes use of brain scans to make inferences about the localisation of brain function.

• Evaluation of the Idiographic approach:

  • Qualitative data produces an in-depth and more complete account of an individual: This may support existing theories or challenge general laws and lead to the development of improved psychological theories through the process of deduction.

  • However, it offers a narrow and restricted perspective: Theories developed from case studies and (unstructured) interviews may struggle to be generalised beyond the individual, thus reducing the ecological validity of these findings.

  • The research methods used, such as case studies and unstructured interviews, lack scientific rigour: These methods rely heavily on individual and subjective interpretation.

• Evaluation of the nomothetic approach:

  • Highly scientific methods: The nomothetic approach makes use of research methods which objectively produce reliable data through adopting standardised conditions and a high level of control of extraneous and confounding variables.

  • Enables unifying laws and general principles to be reliably established: The focus on objectively collecting reliable data has led to certain ‘norms’ or standards of behaviour to be established, such as the average IQ score being 100.

  • May undervalue the impact of individual experiences: Some have criticised the nomothetic approach as ‘losing the whole person’ in psychology due to such an emphasis on establishing universal norms and unifying laws of behaviour.

  • Nomothetic and idiographic approaches may be complementary to each other, rather than contradictory: For example, Milton and Davis (1996) suggest that research should start with a nomothetic approach and once general laws have been produced, the focus should switch to an idiographic approach to develop our understanding and theories.

Ethical implications of research studies and theory

• Socially-sensitive research: Any research that might have direct social consequences for the participants in the research or the group that they represent.

• The major BPS ethical guidelines are respect, competence, responsibility and integrity.

• Examples of socially sensitive research:

  • Bowlby’s monotropic attachment theory: Bowlby was an advisor to the World Health Organisation in the 1950s, following his theory that the critical period for attachment formation with the primary caregiver was the first 2 years of life, and maternal deprivation during this time could have severe emotional and intellectual consequences for the child

  • Burt’s research into intelligence: Burt (1955) fraudulently published research demonstrating that the heritability coefficient for intelligence was 0.77, and so played a significant part in the development of the 11+ examinations.

  • The consequences of socially sensitive research are:

    • Uses/public policy (e.g. Burt’s influence on the 11+ exams), the validity of research (e.g. Burt’s work being proven as false) and the implications of the research (on the way in which individuals or groups of people view themselves and the way in which they’re viewed by society).

• Evaluation of ethical implications of research studies and theory:

  • Important that researchers do not stay away from socially sensitive research: This is important because such research may have major positive impacts, such as challenging stereotypes or ‘scientific justifications’ for discrimination.

  • Social Control: Socially sensitive research has historically been used as ‘scientific justification’ for discriminatory practices.. William Shockley’s Voluntary Sterilisation Bonus Plan, which encouraged low-IQ individuals to undergo sterilisation.

  • Research could be potentially misused, so psychologists should take responsibility for the presentation of findings: For example, Packard proposed the idea of ‘subliminal messaging’, where he found that when pictures of Coca-Cola and popcorn were projected onto cinema screens for split seconds

  • Cost-benefit analysis: When deciding whether certain research projects should be allowed to continue, ethics committees undergo a cost-benefit analysis, where the benefit of the research (such as contribution to the existing field of knowledge) is compared to the costs of breaching ethical guidelines.