Cultural Bias exists when ideas from one culture (often westernised) are used to evaluate the same phenomena within another culture (eastern/tribal communities). It’s a recognised problem in psychology since Binet & Simons (1916/1973) intelligence tests, which overestimated/underestimated people’s abilities, sometimes disadvantaging people. Psychology has moved forward with its ecological understanding, years need to be invested learning the language, culture and motivation of natives in different parts of the world. In doing so, psychological cross-cultural studies can be justified as ecologically valid (Levinson 2012).

Item bias occurs when words have different meanings across cultures. This occurs either in translation, when words are unknown or have ambiguous meanings (Van de Vijer & Leung, 1997). Ekman (1972) conducted research into the universality of facial expressions in Papua New Guinea. From investing time in the culture, he realised there was no local word for ‘disgust’, and therefore adapted question items. Without spending time and researching into the culture, participants would be confused and seem to not recognise ‘disgust’, when really their knowledge would’ve been overestimated. Likewise, if a similar word does exist, the translation could be incorrect (Barger, Nabi, & Hong, 2010); for example, “distress” can be translated to “I feel blue” which isn’t an accurate translation (Shimazu, Bin Nordin, Dollard, & Oakman 2014), and causes translation back translation issues.

With increased understanding to avoid item bias, there is no excuse for cross-cultural research to not pay time and attention to ensuring translation is accurate and understood in new research culture. Research into other cultures is increasing in importance with the surge of refugees coming into Europe with mental health issues that shouldn’t be assessed as a western view.

References:

Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1973). The development of intelligence in children. New York, NY: Arno. (Original work published 1916)

Barger, B., Nabi, R., & Hong, L. Y. (2010). Standard back-translation procedures may not capture proper emotion concepts: A case study of Chinese disgust terms. Emotion, 10, 703-711.

Ekman, P. (1972). Universal and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. R. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1971: Vol. 19 (pp. 207- 283). Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press

Levinson, S. (2012). The Original Sin of Cognitive Science. Topics In Cognitive Science, 4(3), 396-403. doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01195.x

Shimazu, A., Bin Nordin, R., Dollard, M., & Oakman, J. (2014). Psychosocial Factors at Work in the Asia Pacific. New York: Springer.

Van de Vijver, F. J. R., & Leung, K. (1997). Cross-cultural psychology series, Vol. 1. Methods and data analysis for cross-cultural research. Thousand Oaks, CA, US: Sage Publications, Inc.