Gender bias: alpha bias, beta bias and androcentrism

Psychology claims to produce universal theories — but many are based on men and applied to everyone.

• Alpha bias — exaggerating the differences between the sexes, usually devaluing women. Freud's account of the Oedipus complex claims girls' weaker identification with the mother produces a weaker superego and therefore inferior morality.
• Beta bias — minimising or ignoring differences, typically by assuming that findings from male samples apply equally to women. Fight or flight research was conducted almost exclusively on male animals (female hormone fluctuations were considered a nuisance variable) and generalised to everyone — until Taylor et al. (2000) proposed the tend and befriend response, mediated by oxytocin.
• Androcentrism — the consequence of a male-dominated discipline: male behaviour is the standard, and female behaviour is judged 'abnormal' by comparison (for example, PMS has been criticised as medicalising female emotion, while male anger is seen as rational).

Consequences and remedies: gender-biased research creates misleading assumptions, validates discriminatory practices and may deny women opportunities. Feminist psychology (Worrell) proposes criteria for avoiding it: women should be studied in real-life contexts, participate as collaborators, and diversity within groups of women should be examined rather than compared to men. But beware essentialism — 'biological' accounts of sex differences are often politically motivated and presented as fact. Note also that research into gender bias may itself be gender-biased, and that reflexivity — researchers reflecting on their own biases — is now considered a strength of modern research.

Culture bias: ethnocentrism, imposed etics and cultural relativism

• Universality — the assumption that a conclusion applies to all people, regardless of culture. Henrich et al. found that the overwhelming majority of participants in published psychology research are WEIRD (Western, Educated, from Industrialised, Rich Democracies) — so the 'norm' against which everyone else is judged is a narrow one.
• Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by the standards of your own. Ainsworth's Strange Situation is the classic example: it was designed in America, where 'secure' behaviour means moderate distress at separation. Applied in Japan, where infants are rarely separated from their mothers, the same procedure produced high rates of 'insecure-resistant' attachment — but that reflects Japanese child-rearing practice, not insecurity.
• Imposed etic — taking a technique or theory developed in one culture (an emic, culturally specific construct) and imposing it on another as if it were universal. Ainsworth's procedure is an imposed etic. Berry distinguishes the etic (looking at behaviour from outside a culture and seeking universals) from the emic (studying behaviour from inside a culture).
• Cultural relativism — the view that behaviour can only be properly understood within its own cultural context. This does not mean nothing is universal: Ekman found basic facial expressions of emotion are recognised worldwide, and interactional synchrony appears cross-culturally.

Evaluation: culture bias has caused real damage — the US Army IQ tests used in WWI contained items steeped in white American culture, and the resulting 'evidence' that some ethnic groups were less intelligent had enduring, damaging consequences. But be careful of the opposite error: Takano and Osaka reviewed 15 studies comparing the USA and Japan and found that 14 of them found no evidence of the traditional individualism/collectivism distinction, suggesting the individualist-collectivist division may itself be a lazy stereotype.

Name the bias

Free will and determinism

• Free will — we are self-determining and can choose our thoughts and actions. This is the humanistic position (Rogers, Maslow). It has strong face validity — everyday experience is of making choices — and Roberts et al. (2000) found that adolescents with a strong belief in fatalism (that their lives were 'decided') were at greater risk of depression, suggesting a belief in free will has real psychological benefits.
• Hard determinism — free will is an illusion; all behaviour has a cause, and if we knew all the causes we could predict behaviour perfectly. This is compatible with science, which assumes causality.
• Soft determinism — James: behaviour is determined, but people can still exercise conscious choice within those constraints. The cognitive approach takes this line.
• Biological determinism — genes, neurochemistry and the brain (e.g. the influence of the MAOA gene on aggression). Environmental determinism — Skinner: 'free will is an illusion'; behaviour is the product of our reinforcement history. Psychic determinism — Freud: behaviour is determined by unconscious conflicts repressed in childhood; even a slip of the tongue has a cause.

The killer evidence. Libet et al. (1983) asked participants to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while their brain activity was monitored, and to note the instant they felt the conscious will to move. The readiness potential in the brain appeared about half a second before the participant reported a conscious decision to act. The brain seemingly decides before we are aware of deciding — a serious challenge to free will. But defenders point out that the conscious awareness of the decision may come after the brain begins preparing to move without that showing the decision was not ours. Determinism also raises grave issues for the legal system, which assumes offenders exercised choice: in 1981 the 'Chromosome 21' defence — the claim that a defendant's genes made him do it — was rejected by a US court.

The nature-nurture debate

Nature — nativists (Descartes) argue human characteristics are innate, the result of heredity. Evidence comes from concordance rates in twin studies and from heritability estimates: for IQ, heritability is generally put at around 0.5 across many studies, meaning both genes and environment are important.

Nurture — empiricists (Locke) argue the mind is a blank slate at birth, shaped entirely by experience. Behaviourism is the strongest expression of this position. 'Environment' is broad: Lerner distinguishes prenatal influences (the mother's diet, smoking, stress) from postnatal ones (the family, school and wider culture).

Why the question is badly posed:

• Interactionism — the two cannot be separated. In attachment, an infant's innate temperament influences the way the parent responds, which then shapes the attachment — an interaction, not a sum of separate parts.
• The diathesis-stress model — a genetic vulnerability (diathesis) is only expressed if an environmental trigger (stressor) occurs. Tienari et al. (2004) found that adopted children with a biological mother who had schizophrenia were most likely to develop the disorder themselves if the adoptive family was rated as high in criticism and conflict — genes and environment together.
• Epigenetics — a change in genetic activity without a change in the genetic code, caused by life experience (smoking, diet, trauma). Epigenetic 'switches' turn genes on and off — and can be passed to the next generation. Dias and Ressler (2014) gave male lab mice electric shocks paired with the smell of acetophenone; the mice's children, and their grandchildren, showed a fear response to the odour even though they had never encountered it. This introduces a third element into the debate: the experiences of our ancestors.

Which model?

Holism, reductionism and levels of explanation

• Holism — a system cannot be understood by studying its parts; behaviour must be studied as an indivisible whole. Gestalt psychology ('the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'), humanistic psychology and Zimbardo's account of conformity to social roles are holistic. Some phenomena — the behaviour of a group in the SPE, or the experience of depression — only make sense at the group or whole-person level.
• Reductionism — behaviour is best explained by breaking it into its simplest constituent parts. Based on the scientific principle of parsimony: the simplest explanation that fits is best.
• Biological reductionism — behaviour reduced to genes, neurotransmitters and brain structure (e.g. explaining OCD by low serotonin, and treating it with SSRIs).
• Environmental (stimulus-response) reductionism — behaviourism reduces complex learning to a chain of stimulus-response links, ignoring cognition.
• Levels of explanation. There is a hierarchy from the socio-cultural, through the psychological and physical, down to the physiological and finally the neurochemical. Take OCD: at the socio-cultural level, repetitive hand-washing is behaviour others regard as odd; at the psychological level, the person experiences an obsessive thought; at the physical level, they wash their hands; at the physiological level, the OFC-thalamus circuit is hyperactive; at the neurochemical level, serotonin is low. Each level is legitimate — and none is complete on its own.

Evaluation: reductionist explanations form the basis of scientific research, because variables must be operationalised and broken down before they can be measured — which gives psychology credibility. But reductionism can lead to errors of understanding: the physiology of pointing a finger is identical whether one is pointing at a bird or threatening someone, and only the social context tells us which. An interactionist approach — combining levels, as in the biosocial or diathesis-stress models — is usually the most useful conclusion.

Idiographic and nomothetic approaches

• Idiographic — from the Greek idios ('private, personal'). Focuses on the individual and on subjective experience, treating each person as unique. It uses qualitative methods: case studies, unstructured interviews, thematic analysis. The humanistic approach (Rogers' therapy) and the psychodynamic approach (Little Hans, Anna O) are idiographic.
• Nomothetic — from nomos ('law'). Seeks to establish general laws of behaviour, studying large samples with quantitative, statistical methods. The behaviourist, cognitive and biological approaches are nomothetic. Radford and Kirby identify three kinds of general law: classifying people into groups (DSM), establishing principles (conditioning) and establishing dimensions (IQ).

Evaluation: the idiographic approach provides complete, in-depth accounts of the individual, and a single case can generate hypotheses for later study and even overturn a general law — HM's case study is one of the most important in the history of memory research. But the approach is narrow: it is difficult to generalise from a sample of one, and interpretation is subjective. The nomothetic approach is scientific — controlled, standardised, replicable — and it has produced findings that allow prediction and control (e.g. drug therapies). Its cost is the 'loss of the whole person': knowing that 1% of people will develop schizophrenia tells us nothing about what it is like to live with it. Freud, note, used both: idiographic case studies to develop nomothetic laws of personality — which is why the best answer is that the two approaches are complementary.

Idiographic or nomothetic?

Ethical implications and socially sensitive research

Ethical implications go beyond the treatment of participants: they concern the impact of the research on the wider group that the participants represent, and on public policy. Researchers can control how they treat participants; they cannot control how their findings are used.

Sieber and Stanley (1988) defined socially sensitive research as studies with potential consequences for the participants or the class of people they represent, and identified concerns at each stage:

• The research question — asking 'are there racial differences in IQ?' can itself be damaging.
• The methodology — including confidentiality and anonymity: what happens if a participant admits to a crime?
• The institutional context — who funds the research, and how will they use it?
• Interpretation and application — how might the findings be used by the media, politicians or employers?

Examples. Bowlby's maternal deprivation hypothesis has been used to argue that mothers of young children should not work — a socially sensitive conclusion with real consequences for women. Research into the reliability of eyewitness testimony has changed police practice for the better. The most notorious example is the eugenics movement, and the misuse of early intelligence testing to justify compulsory sterilisation in some US states.

Evaluation: avoiding socially sensitive research is not the answer — that would leave psychology unable to address the questions that matter most, such as sexuality, prejudice, or the reliability of children's evidence. Scarr argues such research has directly benefited under-represented groups by challenging prejudice. The responsibility is therefore to be careful: consult those affected, weigh costs and benefits honestly, take particular care with interpretation, and be alert to the fact that even a well-conducted study can be misused.

Whose problem?

Alpha or beta?

Level of explanation

Which determinism?

Idiographic or nomothetic?

Name the issue or debate

Tap a statement, then the debate it belongs to. Being able to name the debate is what turns description into evaluation.

Term and meaning

Tap an item on the left, then its partner on the right.

The big ideas to know

You have covered the whole of AQA 4.3.1 Issues and debates in Psychology — the compulsory section of Paper 3. Press Finish to see your score.