ABSTRACT
Gender and culture in psychology – universality and bias. Cultural bias including ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. Social influence is concerned with the influence of social situations on behaviour and as such expected forms of behaviour or norms are particularly important. This is one area where cultural bias may become a little more obvious and one area where the need for cultural relativism may be extremely important. One of the classic studies of attachment type was done by Mary Ainsworth. The ‘strange situation’ studies allowed us to recognise types of attachment in infants from their responses to a series of artificially created scenarios involving the infant, their mother and a stranger. One of the problems faced by psychological research is the extent to which the methods chosen are appropriate for studying people in other cultures.
