Psychology researches, like the majority of any field of scientific research, are conduced in the United States or in Western Europe. The results are often generalized to the global population. However, the associated biaises are greatly underestimated. We are going to talk about how culture cannot be ignored in psychology studies.
The research by Morris and Peng (1994) highlights differences of attributions in the same social events when having a Western culture or a non-Western culture. The experiment was based on the analysis of the interaction in a group of fishes in a cartoon. They are all identical, but one of them deviate his trajectory from that of others. The subjects are asked to interpret the trajectories of the fishes. There are three sets of display : compulsion, collection and connection. We will focus here on the connection set, with two modalities, but the results are the same for every display. The two modalities are :
- connecting, that is when the group or the individual join the other ;
- separating, that is when the group or the individual leave the other
The Figure 1 illustrates these two modalities of connection or seperation. After showing the cartoons, we ask the subjects firstly to familiarize themselves with the following questions and then, to answer them on a 5-point scale, from not at all to mostly (knowing that the blue fish corresponds to the lonely fish):
- “Does the blue fish seem to be an important member of the group?” ;
- “To what extent do the blue fish’s movements seem influenced by internal factors?” ;
- “To what extent do the blue fish’s movements seem influenced by the other fish?” ;
- “To what extent do the other fish’s movements seem influenced by the blue fish?”.
The results show that Americans and Chinese people do not understand the same way the social events drawn on the cartoons. Americans attribute to the lonely fish or the group to leave the other, that is the separating modality, which means they perceive more influence of internal factors, while Chinese attribute to the group of fishes or the lonely fish to join the other, that is the connecting modality, so they perceive more external influence on the lonely fish motion. The authors add that there is an effect of anthropomorphization on the social events with the fishes. This means that people attribute the trajectories of the fishes according to the functionning of their own culture.
To conclude, the study has demonstrated that each culture has a biaised perception of social events. Here, the individualistic or dispositional vision of Americans or Western people is a way to interpret social behaviours, as much as the holistic or situational point of view of Chinese people. This type of cross-cultural studies highlight the problem of generalizing the results of a study based only on a Western population.
Reference
- Morris, M., Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949–71.
- link : https://culcog.berkeley.edu/Publications/1994JPSP_MorrisPeng.pdf