Gender and Culture in Psychology

gender
1. Gender bias results when one gender is treated less favourably than the other, often referred to as sexism and it has a range of consequences including:
  1. Scientifically misleading
  2. Upholding stereotypical assumptions
  3. Validating sex discrimination
  4. Alpha bias - this occurs when the differences between men and women are exaggerated. Therefore, stereotypically male and female characteristics may be emphasised.
  5. Beta bias -this occurs when the differences between men and women are minimised. This often happens when findings obtained from men are applied to women without additional validation.
  6. Androcentrism - taking male thinking/behavior as normal, regarding female thinking/behavior as deviant, inferior, abnormal, ‘other’ when it is different.
2. Positive Consequences of Gender Bias
  1. Alpha Bias: Has led to some theorists (Gilligan) to assert the worth and valuation ‘feminine qualities’. • Has led to healthy criticism of cultural values that praise certain ‘male’ qualities such as aggression and individualism as desirable, adaptive and universal.
  2. Beta Bias: Makes people see men and women as the same, which has led to equal treatment in legal terms and equal access to, for example, education and employment.
3. Negative Consequences of Gender Bias
  1. Alpha Bias: • Focus on differences between genders leads to the implication of similarity WITHIN genders, thus this ignores the many ways women differ from each other. • Can sustain prejudices and stereotypes.
  2. Beta Bias: • Draws attention away from the differences in power between men and women. • Is considered as an egalitarian approach but it results in major misrepresentations of both genders.
4. Consequences of Gender Bias
  1. Kitzinger (1998) argue that questions about sex differences aren’t just scientific questions – they’re also political (women have same rights as men). So gender differences distorted to maintain the status quo of male power.
  2. Women kept out of male-dominant universities.
  3. Women were oppressed.
  4. Women stereotypes (Bowlby)
culture
1. Culture can be described as all the knowledge and values shared by a society.
2. Cultures may differ from one another in many ways, so that the findings of psychological research conducted in one culture may not apply directly to another.
3. people are affected by a range of factors that are specific to the cultural group in which they developed and within which they live. Psychologists should always attempt to account for the ways in which culture affects thinking and behavior.
4. consequences
  1. Psychologists may overlook the importance of cultural diversity in understanding human behavior, resulting in theories that are scientifically inadequate.
  2. They may also privilege their own worldview over those that emerge from other cultures, leading to research that either intentionally or unintentionally supports racist and discriminatory practices in the real world.
5. Emics
  1. An emic construct is one that is applied to only in one cultural group, so they vary from place to place (differences between cultures).
  2. An emic approach refers to the investigation of a culture from within the culture itself. This means that research of European society from a European perspective is emic, and African society by African researchers in Africa is also emic.
    1. An emic approach is more likely to have ecological validity as the findings are less likely to be distorted or caused by a mismatch between the cultures of the researchers and the culture being investigated.
  3. Culture bias can occur when a researcher assumes that an emic construct (behavior specific to a single culture) is actually an etic (behavior universal to all cultures).
6. Ethnocentrism
  1. Ethnocentrism occurs when a researcher assumes that their own culturally specific practices or ideas are ‘natural’ or ‘right’. The individual uses their own ethnic group to evaluate and make judgments about other individuals from other ethnic groups.
7. Cultural Relativism
  1. Cultural relativism is the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself.
  2. The principle is sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research, as well as to avoid judging another culture by the standards of one's own culture. For this reason, cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism.

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