Issues and Debates

Question 1

Gender and Culture in Psychology - Gender Bias (A01)

Answer 1

• the definition of ‘biased’ means leaning towards a subjective view that does not necessarily reflect an objective view, bias in research may be inevitable despite researchers’ claims about facts that are objective and value-free
• biased research also undermines the universality if psychology as it leads to conclusions being drawn not being applied to everyone or everywhere, regardless of time and culture
• alpha bias refers to research that exaggerates differences which are often fixed and inevitable, this bias often exaggerates the behaviour of women compared to men therefore devaluing them, an example of alpha bias in research is Freud’s theory of psychosexual development where he claims that during the phallic stage boys develop a stronger sense of desire for the opposite-sex parent and boys develop a strong castration anxiety for their father, this resolves in boys having a stronger super-ego than girls and therefore girls are morally inferior to boys, alpha bias can also work in women’s favour found by Chodorow where she found that mothers and daughter are more connected than mothers and sons because of biological similarities and as a result of the closer bond women go on to develop better abilities to bond with others and empathise
• beta bias in research ignores or minimises differences, this happens when it is assumed that research findings apply equally to both genders even when females have been excluded from research, one example of beta bias in research is the fight or flight response because research used male animals over females due to the belief that female behaviour changes due to hormones in ovulation therefore completely ignoring any possible differences between how males and females may act in a threatening situation and assuming that both males and females respond with fight or flight, more recently Taylor et al. (2000) found that females tend respond with a ‘tend and befriend’ response rather than fight or flight due to women having higher levels of oxytocin than men and that during stress women’s oxytocin levels increase further therefore reducing ‘fight or flight’ and leading to a ‘tend and befriend’ response (an evolved response for looking after others), research that minimises gender differences may result in a misrepresentation of female or male behaviour such as the research into attachment that concluded that mothers make better primary care-givers however counter-research showed fathers can take up the nurture role
• alpha bias and beta bias are consequences of androcentrism which is when normal behaviour is judged to the male standard meaning that female behaviour is often judged to be ‘abnormal’, over the years psychology has presented a male-dominated world such as only 6 of the 100 published ‘most influential psychologists’ being female which suggests that psychology has been a subjected produced by males, for males and about males (an androcentric perception), when female behaviour has been recognised it has often been pathologised (taken as a sign of illness) such as PMS being a diagnosed disorder that medicalises female emotions like anger by explaining them in hormonal terms, whereas male anger is often seen as a rational response to external pressures

Question 2

Gender and Culture in Psychology - Gender Bias (A03)

Answer 2

• a limitation is that gender differences are often seen as fixed and enduring however biological research counters it, Maccoby and Jacklin conducted several gender studies and concluded that girls have superior verbal ability and boys have superior spatial ability and suggested that these abilities are hard-wired into the brain before birth, such findings became widely reported and seen as ‘facts’ however Joel et al. (2015) used brain scanning and found no such gender differences in the brain structure or processing, Maccoby and Jacklin’s findings may have become so popularised because they fit the stereotypes of girls being ‘speakers’ and boys being ‘doers’, this suggests that we should be weary about accepting research findings as biological facts when they should be labelled as social theories
  however, this does not mean that psychologists should avoid studying possible gender differences in the brain, Ingalhalikar researched the popular stereotype that females are better at multi-tasking than men through biological research as it seems that female brains have more connections between the left and right hemispheres than male brains, this means there may be biological differences but we should still be very weary of exaggerating the effect they have on behaviour
• another limitation is that gender bias promotes sexism in the research process, women remain under-represented in university departments specifically science, although the majority of psychology undergrads are female lecturers in psychology departments are more likely to be male (Murphy et al.) this means research is more likely to be conducted by males and therefore increases the chance that it disadvantages female participants, for example a male researcher may expect female participants to act irrationally or not understand complex tasks (Nicholson 1995) and such expectations also mean female participants are more likely to underperform in studies, this means the institutional structures and methods of psychology may produce findings that are gender-biased
• another limitation is that research challenging gender-biases may not be published, Formanowicz et al. (2018) analysed more than 1000 articles related to gender-bias that were published over 8 years, they found that the research into gender bias is funded less and published by less prestigious journals therefore fewer scholars were aware of it and therefore didn’t monitor it in their own work, researchers argued that this still held true when comparing other forms of bias like ethnic and when other factors were controlled like the gender of the researcher and methodology, suggesting that gender bias in psychology may not be taken as serious as other biases

Question 3

Gender and Culture in Psychology - Cultural Bias (A01)

Answer 3

• universality is also a consideration in cultural biased research, Henrich et al (2010) reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology and found that 68% of the participants were from the USA and 96% were from industrialised cultures, Arnett found that 80% of participants were undergraduate psychology students, these findings suggest that what we know about human behaviour based off of psychological research has a strong cultural bias, psychologists claimed to have discovered facts about universal human behaviour however their samples have commonly being limited from a diversity of cultures, Henrich used ‘WEIRD’ to outline which groups are most likely to be studied by psychologists: Westernised, Educated people from Industrialised, Rich Democracies, if the norm or standard for a particular behaviour is set by WEIRD people then the behaviour of those from different cultures would be seen as ‘abnormal’ or inferior’
• ethnocentrism refers to judging other cultures by standards and values of one’s own culture, it is the belief of one’s own culture being superior which can lead to discrimination and prejudice towards other cultures, the Strange Situation is an example of this as it is criticised for only reflecting the norms of American behaviour, they characterised babies into attachment types and suggested an ‘ideal’ type which was researched through the babies showing moderate amounts of distress when being distanced from their mother, however this is a mis-representation of childrens’ behaviour in other cultures that deviate from the American ‘norm’, such as Japanese children being more likely to be classified as insecurely-attached due to showing high distress signs when being separated from their mothers (Takahashi 1986) which is more likely explained by the Japanese families typically spending more time together so the baby would be less used to being separated rather than being insecurely attached
• Berry drew a distinction between an etic and an emic - an etic looking at behaviour outside of a given culture and tends to describe those behaviours as universal, an etic identifies behaviours from inside a culture that are specific to that culture, Ainsworth and Bell’s Strange Situation is an example of an imposed etic as they studied behaviour in one culture (America) and assumed an ideal attachment type and claimed it to be universal (as well as the methodology of the procedure), another imposed etic can be how we define abnormality and how different cultures consider behaviours to be normal or abnormal
• Berry argues that psychology is guilty of an imposed etic approach by arguing that models, concepts and theories are universal when they actually come through emic research of one culture, it is suggested that psychologists should be more aware and careful about cultural relativism of their research and that the things they discover may only make sense from the perspective of the culture of which they were discovered and being able to recognise this is one way of avoiding cultural bias

Question 4

Gender and Culture in Psychology - Cultural Bias (A03)

Answer 4

• one strength is the emergence of cultural psychology, according to Cohen cultural psychology is the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience, this is an emerging field and incorporates work and research from other disciplines like anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural psychologists take emic approaches to research and conduct research from inside a culture alongside local researchers using culturally-based techniques in order to avoid making ethnocentric assumptions, cross-cultural research tends to focus on just two cultures instead of larger scale studies that may involve eight or more countries/cultures, this suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it
• one limitation is that majority of the most influential studies are culturally-biased, cultural bias is a feature of many of the classic studies of social influence such as Asch and Milgram’s participants both being purely US who were mostly white and middle-classed and replications of the studies in other cultures showed different results, such as Asch-like studies in collectivist cultures showed significantly higher rates of conformity than in the original individualistic culture (Smith and Bond 1993)
  however, in an age of increased media globalisation it can be argued that the individualistic-collectivist distinction no longer applies, the traditional argument is that individualistic cultures like the US and UK value individuals and independence whilst collectivist cultures like China and India value society and the needs of a group, however Yohtaro and Osaka found that 14/15 studies comparing the US and Japan showed no evidence of individualism or collectivism and described the distinction as lazy and simplistic, therefore suggesting that cultural bias may be less of a problem in more modern psychological studies and research
• one limitation of cultural bias in psychology is that it has lead to a prejudice against certain groups of people, Gould explained how the first intelligence tests lead to eugenic social policies in the US (pressuring people with desirable traits to reproduce), psychologists used WW1 as an opportunity to pilot the first IQ test on 1.75 million recruits, many of the items in the test were ethnocentric, such as assuming they would all know the names of US presidents, the test resulted that people from south-eastern Europe and African-American had the lowest scores, however the lower scorers were not judged because of the inadequacy of the test but were instead used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular ethnic and cultural groups, as a result of this ethnic minorities were deemed ‘mentally unfit’ and ‘feeble-minded’ in comparison to the white majority and were therefore denied educational opportunities and professions, therefore this illustrates how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards certain groups of people

Question 5

Free Will and Determinism (A01)

Answer 5

• “the extent to which a behaviour is driven by internal and external events or if it is down to choice
• hard determinism is the extreme stance that ignores free will completely, always look for a cause, compatible with science
• soft determinism involves elements of free will but aspects are pre-determined, behaviour may be predictable (caused by internal/external factors) but there is room for personal choice
• biological determinism is the belief that behaviour is caused by biological factors like genetics, hormones or evolution that we cannot control
• environmental determinism is the belief that behaviour is caused by environmental factors that we cannot control (like rewards and punishments)
• psychic determinism is the belief that behaviour is caused by unconscious psychodynamic conflicts that we cannot control
• free will is the notion that humans can make their own decisions about behaviour and thoughts and that they are not determines by biological or external forces, free will is a feature of humanism and partially in SLT when we choose who to imitate

Question 6

Free Will and Determinism (A03)

Answer 6

• strength of free will is its practical value as we exercise free will in every day choices we make as well as thinking we can exercise free will improves our mental health, Roberts et al. found that adolescents who believed in fatalism were significantly more likely to develop depression

Question 7

Nature-Nurture Debate (A01)

Question 8

Nature-Nurture Debate (A03)

Question 9

Holism and Reductionism (A01)

Question 10

Holism and Reductionism (A03)

Question 11

Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches (A01)

Question 12

Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches (A03)

Question 13

Ethical Implications of Research and Theory (A01)

Question 14

Ethical Implications of Research and Theory (A03)