Cultural Bias Controversy

Question 1

Intro.

Answer 1

Culture - rules/customs/morals and ways of interacting that bind together members of a society/collection of people.
Culture bias - tendency of people to make asssumptions about the behaviour of others based on their own cultural norms/practices.
There is culture bias in psych - mostly western viewpoint (researchers, ps) theories are developed in one culture and applied inappropriately to another.
Findings are interpreted from the viewpoint of the researcher’s own culture.
Western = individualistic.
Eastern = collectivist.

Question 2

Culture bias key terms.

Answer 2

Cross-cultural research -research that aims to investigate whether cultural practices have an impact on behaviour.
Ethnocentrism - the use of our own ethnic/cultural group as a basis for jugement for other groups.
Cultural relativism - the idea that all cultures are different and equally worthy of respect.
Alpha bias - recognises that cultures are different and devalues them based on the idea that their own culture is better.
Etic approach - looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to find trends that can be generalised. Imposed etic is when techniques created in one culture are applied to another.
Emic approach - looks within cultures and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture.

Question 3

Cross cultural studies.

Answer 3

Aim to investigate how cultural practices affect behaviour.
+allows us to consider whether behaviours are innate, if behaviours are the same in all then it must be genetic. Buss looked at relationships in 36 countries and found all the same mate preferences.
-different cultures may find it difficult to understand local practices so misrepresent the ps understanding. In Buss’s study, they were interviewed by indigenous researcher. Questionnaire was translated. Had to get 3 researchers from each country to ensure relevance.

Question 4

Cross-cultural counter and link.

Answer 4

Still issues with culture bias:
Translation - giving instructions verbally/written means findings have to be translated, true meaning may be lost in translation. Using similar ps to og study does not mean that they will have the same social background/experiences.
Although it makes it easier to generalise behaviour to other cultures, there are many issues, like impracticality and time-consuming. May not make sense in other countries.

Question 5

Difference or bias.

Answer 5

It can be easy to confuse difference and bias in psych research.
Myers and Diener found that individualistic cultures were happier than collectivist. This could be because you work to make yourself happy, however, in collectivist cultures, it takes more effort to make a whole group happy.
However, the studies were created by western psychs. This is an issue as there may be an imposed etic where they apply a western view of SWB to eastern cultures - may have a different definition of SWB.
But some of M+Ds studies may have been conducted with eastern viewpoint, but analysed through western lense.