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The ethnocentrism of Psychology.

Ethnocentrism is ubiquitous in the world. It affects preferential judgments of every kind including evaluations of religion, ideology, and culture. Children already at a very young age have preferences for their own cultural symbols, and view the world through the lenses of their internalized cultural values. Since ethnocentrism is at best a simplification it leads to many errors of judgment. Evaluating all important perspectives from that of one’s own culture distorts the truth about other people, and does not take into account the full complexity of other cultures and societies. Unfortunately ethnocentrism must necessarily also affect cross-cultural psychology. The very choice of what we study is based on the knowledge developed in our own culture, and most cross-cultural research choices seeks to expand that knowledge into other groups and societies. Indigenous psychology would argue that topics not studied in the dominant Western based cross-cultural psychology are salient in other cultures. The psychological assessments we make are often based on concepts and instruments that have culturally specific meaning, and can only be translated at the risk of introducing concepts of little or no importance to other cultures. It requires careful translation as well as some evidence of cultural relevance before cross-cultural researchers can validly apply psychological assessments from one culture to another. Likewise the development of psychological theories in general is universally based on Western thought and data. Research based on Western theories applied in other cultures may contain ethnocentric bias and error.

However, these biases can be reduced by following careful procedures, and by inclusion of diverse cultures in the data base. Scientists are not immune from cultural bias and must be on alert for ethnocentric distortion in translation and conceptual development. Replication is needed to establish the validity of any psychological construct, and since times are changing psychological models must respond to these ubiquitous developments. Only over the long run through careful replication work can we be assured of a valid and reliable cross-cultural discipline. In recent decades some researchers have sought to develop a psychology from non-Western approaches. Although only modest research has been completed the development of indigenous psychological models may gather steam in the future (Sinha, 1997). We will discuss this approach in later chapters.

 


Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1058


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