Cultural Bias

Question 1

Cole et al (1971)

Answer 1

asked adult members of the Kpelle tribe in Africa to sort familiar objects into groups. In western societies people would sort the objects into categories. The Kpelle tribes sorted them into functional groups suggesting that the definition of intelligence can differ from culture to culture.

Question 2

Hofstede (1984)

Answer 2

outlined the main differences between individualist and collectivist cultures.

Question 3

Myers and Diener (1995)

Answer 3

collated this research under different areas and wrote up their review, drawing conclusions about factors affecting happiness

Question 4

Maracek (1988)

Answer 4

proposed that bias can exist in two forms:
Alpha bias - assumption that there are actual differences between cultural groups, this causes a problem because if we assume that there are large differences between cultures we may miss universals of human behaviour
Beta bias - assumption that all people are the same, this is the opposite of alpha bias as differences between groups are ignored.

Question 5

Rozenzweig (1992)

Answer 5

found that 64% of the world’s 56,000 researchers in psychology are American

Question 6

Haggbloom et al (2002)

Answer 6

used various kinds of evidence to identify the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century. Less than 20% of them (including Freud, Piaget, Pavlov and Vygotsky) were non-American.