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.
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Cultural bias is the phenomenon of interpreting and judging phenomena by standards inherent to one's own culture. The phenomenon is sometimes considered a problem central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Some practitioners of the aforementioned fields have attempted to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate cultural bias. Cultural bias occurs when people of a culture make assumptions about conventions, including conventions of language, notation, proof and evidence. They are then accused of mistaking these assumptions for laws of logic or nature. Numerous such biases exist, concerning cultural norms for color, mate selection, concepts of justice, linguistic and logical validity, the acceptability of evidence, and taboos. Cultural bias has no a priori definition.[clarification needed] Instead, its presence is inferred from differential performance of socioracial (e.g., Blacks, Whites), ethnic (e.g., Latinos/Latinas, Anglos), or national groups (e.g., Americans, Japanese) on measures of psychological constructs such as cognitive abilities, knowledge or skills (CAKS), or symptoms of psychopathology (e.g., depression). Historically, the term grew out of efforts to explain between group score differences on CAKS tests primarily of African American and Latino/Latina American test takers relative to their White American counterparts and concerns that test scores should not be interpreted in the same manner across those groups in the name of fairness and equality (see also Cognitive dissonance). Although the concept of cultural bias in testing and assessment also pertains to score differences and potential misdiagnoses with respect to a broader range of psychological concepts, particularly in applied psychology and other social and behavioral sciences, this aspect of cultural bias has received less attention in the relevant literature.[1] Cultural bias in psychological testing refers to the standardized psychological tests that are conducted to determine the level of intelligence among the test-takers. Limitations of such verbal or non-verbal intelligence tests have been observed since their introduction. Many tests have been objected to, as they produced poor results for the ethnic or racial minorities (students), as compared to the racial majorities. There is minimal evidence supporting claims of cultural bias and cross-cultural examination is both possible and done frequently.[2] As discussed above, the learning environment, the questions posed or situations given in the test may be familiar and strange at the same time to students from different backgrounds[3][better source needed]- the type of ambiguity in which intellectual differences become apparent in individual capacities to resolve the strange-yet-familiar entity. Cultural bias in economic exchange is often overlooked. A study done at the Northwestern University[4] suggests that the cultural perception that two countries have of each other plays a large factor in the economic activity between them. The study suggests that low bilateral trust between two countries results in less trade, less portfolio investment, and less direct investment. The effect is amplified for goods, as they are more trust-intensive. The concept of culture theory in anthropology explains that cultural bias is a critical piece of human group formation. SociologyIt is thought that societies with conflicting beliefs will more likely have cultural bias, as it is dependent on the group's standing in society in which the social constructions affect how a problem is produced. One example of cultural bias within the context of sociology can be seen in a study done at the University of California by Jane R. Mercer[5] of how test "validity", "bias", and "fairness" in different cultural belief systems affect one's future in a pluralistic society. A definition of the cultural bias was given as "the extent that the test contains cultural content that is generally peculiar to the members of one group but not to the members of another group", which leads to a belief that "the internal structure of the test will differ for different cultural groups". In addition, the different types of errors made on culture-biased tests are dependent on different cultural groups. The idea progressed to the conclusion that a non-cultural-test represents the ability of a population as intended and not the abilities of a group that is not represented. Cultural bias may also arise in historical scholarship when the standards, assumptions and conventions of the historian's own era are anachronistically used to report and to assess events of the past. The tendency is sometimes known as presentism and is regarded by many historians as a fault to be avoided.[6] Arthur Marwick has argued that "a grasp of the fact that past societies are very different from our own, and... very difficult to get to know" is an essential and fundamental skill of the professional historian and that "anachronism is still one of the most obvious faults when the unqualified (those expert in other disciplines, perhaps) attempt to do history."[7]
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What is culture bias in research?
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