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Culture bias is the tendency to judge all people in terms of your own cultural assumptions. This distorts or biases your judgement. An example of culture bias can be seen in Ainsworth’s strange situation whereby 106 middle-class American infants were observed in order to test the nature of attachment. This is an example of culture bias as when Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg carried out a meta-analysis of the findings from 32 studies of attachment in 8 different countries they found a cultural variation. This means that Ainsworth’s study was ethnocentric as she evaluated other groups of people using the standards of Western culture wrongly generalising the findings outside of her culture.

 Cultural relativism is the view that behaviour cannot be judged properly unless it is viewed in the context of the culture in which is originates. An example of cultural relativism can be seen when defining abnormality. In the case of statistical infrequency, behaviours that are statistically infrequent in one culture may be statistically more frequent in another. For example, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the hear voices. However, this is an experience that is common in some cultures such as in China. This means that the statistical infrequency model is culturally relative. Ideally, in Psychology we should aim for universality which means the theory can be applied to all people irrespective of gender and culture. 

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Culturally biased research can have significant real life consequences, such as amplifying and damaging stereotypes. An example of this is the US Army IQ test which showed African-Americans at the bottom of the IQ scale with the lowest mental age 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 culture bias is to recognise it when it occurs and to use samples from different cultural groups. Smith and Bond after surveying research in one European textbook that 66% of the studies were American, 32% were European and only 2% came 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.

Consequently, this has led to the development of indigenous psychologies such as “Afrocentrism” which helps counter ethnocentrism in Psychology. Afrocentrism is a movement whose central proposition is that all black people have their roots in Africa and that psychological theories concerning such people must therefore be express African values. his 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. However, whilst indigenous psychologies are viewed as a strength it could be argued that afrocentric theories are just as culturally biased as the theories they claim to replace only tending to African values.