Cultural and gender issues in psychological research.
Culture can be defined as the values, beliefs and patterns of behaviour shared by a group of people.
A variety of factors shape culture and these different factors are reflected in the differences between various cultures. Historically, psychology has been dominated by white, middle-class American males, who have monopolised both as researchers and participants. However, research findings and theories have been generalised, as if culture makes no real difference.
Cultural bias is the tendency to judge people in terms of one's own cultural assumptions. In psychology, cultural bias takes the same two forms as gender bias. Alpha bias occurs when a theory assumes that cultural groups are profoundly different, and that recognition of these enduring differences must always inform psychological research and understanding. Beta bias, on the other hand, occurs when real cultural differences are ignored or minimised, and all people are assumed to be the same, resulting in universal research designs and conclusions that mistakenly assume that all cultures are the same.
Exam Hint: Alpha and beta bias are only required for Gender Bias, and while it is useful to understand these terms, you are only required to understand ethnocentrism and cultural relativism for the Culture in Psychology subtopic.
Another way to consider cultural bias is through the distinction between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
Ethnocentrism means seeing the world only from one’s own cultural perspective, and believing that this one perspective is both normal and correct. Ethnocentrism is an often inadvertent lack of awareness that other ways of seeing things can be as valid as one’s own. For example, definitions of abnormality vary from culture to culture. Rack (1984) claims that African-Caribbeans in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ on the basis of behaviour which is perfectly normal in their subculture, and this is due to the ignorance of African-Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists.
Ainsworth's Strange Situation is another example of ethnocentric research. The Strange Situation was developed to assess attachment types, and many researchers assume that the Strange Situation has the same meaning for the infants from other cultures, as it does for American children. German children, on average, demonstrate a higher rate of insecure-avoidant behaviour. However, it is not the case that German mothers are more insensitive than American mothers. Instead, they value and encourage independent behaviour, and therefore their children react differently in the Strange Situation. The Strange Situation has been described as an imposed etic, where a technique or theory is developed in one culture and then imposed on another.
Extension: An etic approach looks at behaviour from the outside, whereas emic approach considers behaviour from the inside.
Cultural relativism insists that behaviour can be properly understood only if the cultural context is taken into consideration. Therefore, any study which draws its sample from only one cultural context (like American college students) and then generalises its findings to all people everywhere, is suspect.
According to this viewpoint, the meaning of intelligence is different in every culture. For example, Sternberg (1985) pointed out that coordination skills that may be essential to life in a preliterate society (e.g., those motor skills required for shooting a bow and arrow) may be mostly irrelevant to intelligent behaviour for most people in a literate and more “developed” society.
When a theory is described as universal, it means that it can apply to all people, irrespective of gender and culture. However, this also means that it needs to include real differences.
In relation to gender, this means developing theories that show the similarities and differences between males and females, without devaluing either gender. This may mean using a variety of research methods and considering women in the natural settings in which they function. With regard to culture, one way to achieve universality would be to employ what Berry (1969) described as a derived etic. This is where a series of emic studies take place in local settings, conducted by local researchers using local techniques. Such studies can build up a picture of human behaviour in a similar way to the ethnographic approach taken by anthropologists. This is the study of different cultures through the use of comparisons, as by making comparisons between cultures we can learn more about a target culture.
Culturally biased research can have significant real-world effects by, for example, amplifying and validating damaging stereotypes. The US Army used an IQ test before WWI which was culturally biased toward the dominant white majority. Unsurprisingly, the test showed that African-Americans were at the bottom of the IQ scale and this had a negative effect on the attitudes of Americans’ toward this group of people, which highlights the negative impact that culturally biased research can have.
Culturally biased research can have significant real-world effects by, for example, amplifying and validating damaging stereotypes. The US Army used an IQ test before WWI which was culturally biased toward the dominant white majority. Unsurprisingly, the test showed that African-Americans were at the bottom of the IQ scale and this had a negative effect on the attitudes of Americans’ toward this group of people, which highlights the negative impact that culturally biased research can have.
One way to deal with cultural bias is to recognise it when it occurs. Smith and Bond found, in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social psychology, that 66% of the studies were American, 32% European, and only 2% from the rest of the world. This suggests that much psychological research is severely unrepresentative and can be greatly improved by simply selecting different cultural groups to study.
Contemporary psychologists are significantly more open-minded and well-travelled than previously, and have an increased understanding of other cultures at both a personal and professional level. For example, international psychology conferences increase the exchange of ideas between psychologists which has helped to reduce ethnocentrism in psychology and enabled a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of cultural relativism.
This heightened awareness of cultural diversity has led to the development of ‘indigenous psychologies’: theories drawing explicitly on the particular experiences of people in different cultural contexts. One example is Afrocentrism, a movement which suggests that because all black people have their roots in Africa, theories about them must recognise the African context of behaviours and attitudes. This is an example of an emic approach, which emphasises the uniqueness of every culture and looks at behaviour from the inside of a particular cultural system. This matters because it has led to the emergence of theories that are more relevant to the lives and cultures of people not only in Africa, but also to those far removed from their African origins. The development of indigenous psychologies is often seen as a strength of cultural relativism, but there are limitations as well: Are Afrocentric theories not as culturally biased as those they claim to replace?
There has also been some progress in the field of diagnosing mental disorders. Early versions of the American DSM system virtually ignored mental disorders that are found mainly or exclusively in non-American cultures. DSM-IV in 1994 acknowledged the inadequacy of that approach and included a short appendix on culture-bound syndromes found in other parts of the world. However, Kleinman and Cohen (1997) dismissed this appendix as “little more than a sop thrown to cultural psychiatrists and psychiatric anthropologists” and pointed out that detailed work in several non-Western cultures had uncovered many disorders totally ignored by DSM-IV. Examples include: pa-fend (fear of wind) found in China; amafufunyana (violent behaviour caused by spirit possession) found in South Africa and brain fag (problems in concentrating and thinking produced by excessive study) found in West Africa.
The term bias is used to suggest that a person’s views are distorted in some way, and in psychology there is evidence that gender is presented in a biased way. This bias leads to differential treatment of males and females, based on stereotypes and not real differences.
For example, Freud argued that ‘anatomy is destiny’, meaning that there are genuine psychological differences between men and women because of their physiological differences, for example, he claimed young girls suffer from ‘penis envy’, and viewed femininity as failed form of masculinity.
The difficulty lies in distinguishing “real” from culturally created gender differences. Evidence suggests that there are a small number of real gender differences, confirmed through cross-cultural studies. For example, in a review of the research on sex differences, Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) concluded that there were only four differences between boys and girls, including:
Girls have greater verbal ability
Boys have greater visual and spatial abilities
Boys have greater arithmetical ability, a difference that only appears at adolescence
Girls are less aggressive than boys
Androcentrism means being centred on, or dominated by males and can be conscious (the individual knows they are behaving this way) or unconscious. In the past most psychologists were male, and the theories they produced tended to represent a male view of the world. Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1988) argued for there being two types of gender bias: alpha and beta bias.
Alpha bias refers to theories which exaggerate the differences between males and females. For example, in his psychoanalytic approach, Freud argued that because girls do not suffer the same oedipal conflict as boys, they do not identify with their mothers as strongly as boys identify with their fathers, so develop weaker superegos.
The evolutionary approach in psychology has also been criticised for its alpha bias. This is because this approach suggests that evolutionary processes in the development of the human species explain why men tend to be dominant, why women have a more parental investment in their offspring, and why men are more likely to commit adultery. However, society has changed considerably over recent years, and it is argued that the evolutionary perspective shouldn’t be used to justify gender differences.
Beta bias theories have traditionally ignored or minimised sex differences. These theories often assume that the findings from males can apply equally to females.
For example, Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development was based on extensive interviews that he conducted with boys aged 10-16. The same all male sample was then re-interviewed at intervals of 3-4 years over a 20- year period. His classification system is based on a morality of justice and some researchers, such as Carol Gilligan (1982), have found that women tend to be more focused on relationships when making moral decisions and therefore often appear to be at a lower level of moral reasoning when using Kohlberg’s system. Therefore Kohlberg’s approach meant that a real difference was ignored.
There is also evidence of beta bias in psychological research. Male and female participants are used in most studies, but there is normally no attempt to analyse the data to see whether there are significant sex differences. Where differences are found, it may be possible that these occur because researchers ignore the differential treatment of participants. For example, Rosenthal (1966) reported that male experimenters were more pleasant, friendly, honest, and encouraging with female than with male participants. This led Rosenthal to conclude: “Male and female subjects may, psychologically, simply not be in the same experiment at all.”
Even some animal research can be argued to suffer from beta bias. For example, biological research into the fight-or-flight response has often been carried out with male animals because they have less variation in hormones than females. It was assumed that this would not be a problem as the fight-or-flight response would be the same for both. However, later stress research by Taylor et al. (2000) has challenged this view by providing evidence that females produce a tend-and-befriend response. The beta-bias in the earlier animal studies meant that for a long time the stress response was not fully understood and a real difference was ignored.
The result of beta bias in psychological research is that we end up with a view of human nature that is supposed to apply to men and women alike, but in fact, has a male or androcentric bias. For example, Asch’s (1955) conformity studies involved all male participants, as did many of the other conformity studies (e.g., Perrin & Spencer, 1980) and therefore it was assumed that females would respond in the same way.
Unfortunately, issues of gender bias often go unchallenged. For example, Darwin’s established theory of sexual selection suggests that women are selective (choosy) in terms of mate selection. These views have only recently been challenged by DNA evidence suggesting that women are equally as competitive as men when the need arises.
By developing a greater understanding of gender bias, psychologists have put forward a number of solutions. For example, some psychologists attempt to develop theories that emphasise the importance or value of women. Cornwell et al. (2013) noted that females are better at learning, as they are more attentive and organised, thus emphasising both the value and the positive attributes of women. As a result, this type of research helps to reduce or challenge gender stereotypes which is important in reducing gender bias.
Another way to reduce gender bias is to take a feminist approach which attempts to restore the imbalance in both psychological theories and research. For example, feminist psychology accepts that there are biological differences between males and females: Research by Eagly (1978) claims that female are less effective leaders than males. However, the purpose of Eagly’s claim is to help researchers develop training programmes aimed at reducing the lack of female leaders in the real-world.
Worrell (1992) also suggested a number of research criteria that are particularly important to ensure non-gender biased research investigations: using alternative methods of inquiry to explore the personal lives of women; considering women in the natural settings in which they function; collaborating with research participants to explore personally relevant variables and studying diverse samples (women who vary by age, socio-economic class, partner preference, minority or ethnic group).
As society has changed and females have progressed further in academic disciplines such as psychology, there have been changes, both in the research methodology used and to the earlier theories. As previously explained, Carol Gilligan (a student of Kohlberg’s) proposed that women have a different sense of moral understanding to men and compiled her own stage theory of moral understanding. Her approach showed that men and women are different, but neither kind of moral reasoning (justice focus or care focus) is considered to be better, they are just different.
It is also important to remember that sometimes the gender bias can work against males as well as females, as sometimes alpha bias theories heighten the value of women. For example, Chodorow (1978) viewed women as more relational and caring. Another example is that women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and given treatment than males. This may be because woman are more likely to suffer from depression, or it could be that the diagnostic system may be biased towards finding depression among women. The expectation for males should be able to ‘pull themselves together’ is viewed as a masculine trait which may highlight an issue with the psychological diagnostic systems.
Assess whether cultural issues impact on psychological research. (20) January 2019