Title: Cultural Differences in Psychology - Psychologist World
Headings: Cultural Differences in Psychology
Cultural Differences in Psychology
How cultural differences can affect our perception and behavior.
Defining Culture
Individualism vs Collectivism
Bias in Experiments
Cultural Differences in Relationships and Attachments
Cultural differences in emotions
Culture and measuring intelligence
Designing better studies

Content: Sigmund Freud, attributed behavior and our anxieties to inner, unresolved conflicts between the id, the ego and superego, whilst more recently, Abraham Maslow described human motivation as being driven by a set of internal desires in a Hierarchy of Needs. 1
In Depth
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
What motivates humans? Maslow's hierarchy pyramid explains. Learn more
Yet, many of these theories ignore the wider, environmental factors which affect an individual's behavior, one of which is the influence of the cultural experiences that a person lives through and which must also affect the behavior of people who interact with them. Is there a reason for culture being looked over in the mission to understand our thoughts and behavior? Bias in Experiments
The development of psychology as a discipline in the West has inevitably lead to many studies and experiments being carried out in individualistic societies and often more specifically, at universities. Moreover, in 2010, Canadian psychologist Joseph Henrich and his colleagues identified that the participants of such studies tended to be W.E.I.R.D. - Western and Educated, and from Industrialised, Rich and Democratic countries ( Henrich et al, 2010 ). 2 This leads to the question of whether the findings of key psychological studies carry external validity outside not only the experimental situation, but whether they can be generalized to apply outside of the society and culture in which the studies were carried out. Such criticism of psychology studies from a cross-cultural perspective has lead to researchers attempting to replicate experiments' findings in countries other than their original location. Yet this presents a second problem - is there an inherent cultural bias in the experimental methods used to observe behavior?