Cultural bias is a tendency to interpret all phenomena through the “lens” of one’s own culture,
ignoring the effects that cultural differences might have on behaviour. Henrich et al (2010) reviewed
hundreds of studies in leading psychological journals. He found that 68% of research participants
came from US and 96% from industrialised nations. Another review by Amett (2008) found that 80%
of research participants were undergraduates studying psychology. Henrich et al coined the term
WEIRD to describe the group of people 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 people from non-Westernised, less
educated, agricultural and poorer cultures is inevitably seen as “abnormal”, “inferior” or “usual”.
Cultural relativism is the idea that norms and values, as well as ethics and moral standards, can only
be meaningful and understood within specific social and cultural contexts. Berry 1969 has drawn
distinctions between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour. An etic approach
looks at behaviours from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as
universal. An emic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that specific to
that culture. Ainsworth and Bell’s research is an example of an imposed etic because they studied
behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed attachment type could be applied
universally. Another example of an imposed etic can be considered in relation to how we define
abnormality. Berry argues psychology has often been guilty of an imposed etic approach as it argues
that theories, models, concepts are universal, when they actually came through emic research inside
a singe culture. The suggestion is that psychologists should be must more mindful of cultural
relativism on their research. In other words, the findings their collect may only make sense from the
perspective of the culture within which they were discovered, and being able to recognise this is one
way of avoiding cultural bias in research.
Ethnocentrism refers to a particular form of cultural bias and is the belief in the superiority of one’s
own cultural group. An example of this is The Strange Situation by Ainsworth (1970) which was
criticised for only reflecting the norms and values of what is sometimes called ‘Western’ culture.
Ainsworth and Bell conducted research on attachment type, suggesting that “ideal” attachment was
characterised by the babies showing moderate amounts of distress when left alone by their mother-
figure, which is known as secure attachment. However, this led to misrepresentation of child-rearing
practices in other countries which were seen to deviate from the American ‘norm’. For example,
Takahashi (1986) found that Japanese infants which were much more likely to be classed as
insecurely attached because they showed considerable distress on separation.
E.g. its more normal for a Japanese infant to be insecurely attached due to upbringing, but to us
that’s abnormal because deviates from western culture.
One limitation of cultural bias is that it has led to prejudice against groups of people. Gould (1981)
explained how first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in the US. Psychologists used
opportunity of WW1 to pilot their first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits. Many of the items on
the test were ethnocentric, for example assuming everyone would know the names of US presidents.
The results were that recruits from south-eastern Europe and African Americans received the lowest
scores. The poor performance not taken as a sign of the test’s inadequacy but was instead used to
inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular cultural and ethnic groups. Ethnic
minorities were deemed as “mentally unfit” and “feeble minded” in comparison to the white
majority. They were denied educational and professional opportunities This is a limitation of cultural
bias as it illustrates how cultural bias can be used to justify prejudice and discrimination towards
certain cultural and ethnic groups.
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