Cultural bias Flashcards
What is culture?
Can be defined as the norms, values, beliefs and patterns of behaviour shared by a group of people.
What is cultural bias
The tendency to judge people in terms of one’s own cultural assumptions, ignoring any cultural differences and interpreting all psychological findings through the lens of one’s own culture. Historically psychology has been dominated by white middle class broskis. And people generalise these results as if culture makes, no difference
What is ethnocentrism
Seeing the world only from one’s own cultural perspective and believing that one perspective is both normal and correct and perhaps even superior to other cultures. For example rack claims that African Caribbean’s in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill on the basis of behaviour that is perfectly normal in their own culture. This is due to ignorance of African Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists. Strange situation be like.
What is cultural relativism
Insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken fulls into consideration. Therefore any studies that draws its samples from only one cultural context and then generalises is sus.
Evaluation
Cochrane and Sashidharan (1995) found that African-Caribbean immigrants are seven times more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness. This has led many to question the validity of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) for diagnosing individuals who are born outside of the culture that they were developed in.
Cultural biased researched also has significant real world effects, e.g. by amplifying and validating damaging stereotypes. The US army used an IQ test before WW1 which was biased towards the dominant white majority. It showed that African Americans ended up at the lower end of the scale, having a negative effect on the attitudes of Americans towards this group of people.
One way to deal with cultural bias is to recognise it. Smith and Bond found that in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social psychology, 66% studies were American, 32% European and only 2% from the rest of the world. Suggests that much psychological research is unrepresentative and can be improved by simply including more cultural groups.
So contemporary psychologists are more open minded and well travelled than prior psychologists and have an increased understanding of other cultures at both a personal and professional level. E.g. international psychology conferences increase the exchange of ideas between psychologists which has helped reduce ethnocentrism and increased appreciation of cultural relativism.