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Asked by anon-204922 to Sally, Lucy, Louise, James, David, Dan on 5 Mar 2019.
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Lucy Maddox answered on 5 Mar 2019:
Hi!
Great question. I’d say that they definitely can be, if you don’t control for them or acknowledge a lack of variation in them. A confounding variable can influence the variables you are changing and measuring in an experiment and mean that you think one thing is causing the difference but it’s actually the confounder. Psychology research is sadly dominated by studies done on white, middle class people (often psychology students!), and so we do need to be careful to check that any findings also apply in other cultural groups. More studies in more diverse populations would really help with this and also using statistical techniques to check that cultural variation isn’t responsible for any effects you see in your experiments.PS Film-maker is a super cool job 🙂
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Sally Tilt answered on 6 Mar 2019:
The fact that you are asking the question suggests that you might be able to design a good research study! As Lucy says, there probably is a bit of a tendency to have a narrow sample of people in many research studies (students 🙂 ), and this can allow for cultural difference to creep in as a pesky confounding variable.
Unfortunately, there is usually a gap between the ‘perfect’ research study that a researcher would like to design and the reality of the participants that they can access, the time that they have for the study etc. Generally, researchers (hopefully!) will try to spot the confounding variables at the design stage and control for them as much as possible or at least discuss them as issues in their paper.
The other issue that your question highlights is the skill of being able to critically evaluate a research study – to understand the limitations of what a research paper can conclude. It can be quite fun to look out in the media for ‘bad science reporting’ when a newspaper jumps to conclusions that the research that they are referring to cannot (and often never claimed to) support.
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Dan Taylor answered on 6 Mar 2019:
I think this is a fab question! And i’d agree with Lucy and Sally that it’s really important.
Coming from a more biological perspective, I find that a lot of people assume culture may not be important, and I think depending on what you’re studying, it might well be the case. Recently a branch of evolutionary psychology has focused on an idea called cultural evolution. The primary theory that emerged from cultural evolution studies is called Dual Inheritance Theory. It basically suggests that culture and genes have been important for evolution, humans reproduce at a relatively slow rate compared to other animals, so the rate of genetic transmission can be really slow. So culture helps survival by allowing us to rapidly learn new behaviours. A really fantastic example can be found with these cute little monkeys hanging out in a human, outdoor spa (see the video below if for no other reason than its so cute!)I think in terms of having it as a confounding variable specifically, it can definitely be important to control for, if we think about something like sexual beahviour there will be things like personality (extroverts have more sex for example) but if you’re living in a conservative culture, this may effect that extroversion.
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James Munro answered on 10 Mar 2019:
Hey Dan,
Yes! Absolutely! In almost every case. Psychology is going through an identity crisis right now where it is having to confront some of the things it has always taken for granted and understand they are wrong. In my opinion, one of the main problems is a lack of cultural understanding. I am currently trying to research how many studies by psychology researchers use only participants from “white, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic” – WEIRD – societies. Nancy Darling reckons it is 99% in this article https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/thinking-about-kids/201710/attracting-weird-samples
Now, that isn’t a huge problem if psychology researchers always admitted that their findings were limited to one specific group of people, but often this isn’t mentioned at all because they (we) think it is obvious. So it is a massive problem! Our psychology knowledge only matters for a small proportion of the world’s population, and we have very little evidence that any of it is true outside of that population.
One other thing to mention is that “Psychology” doesn’t always mean the same things. “Psychology” in Norway, for example, is almost entirely focused on what UK folk call clinical psychology. In Hungary, psychology is very strongly about experiments linking childhood to adulthood. In France and lots of Mediterranean countries, psychology is often thought of as sitting on a couch and talking about your problems – not a science at all.
So cultural differences effect psychology studies, but also the definition of psychology. Very tricky situation that needs a lot of action and thought.
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Louise Rodgers answered on 11 Mar 2019:
You’ve got some really thorough answers from the other psychologists DanAmeg (I didn’t know that myself about different countries having such differing views of what the profession involves, so that’s something for me to think about!)
If you’re designing a research project in the future and you’ve already started to think about this and about biases in research, you’ve already got a very high level of insight and reflection and I predict you’ll do brilliantly!
If you’re interested in reading more about avoiding biases you might be interested in this article https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/12/22/introductory-psychology-books-accused-of-spreading-myths-and-left-leaning-bias/
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