Question: In your opinion to what extent does cultural differences might effect the findings of a psychological study?

Dan Taylor answered on 6 Mar 2019:

I would start by echoing a lot of what Lucy and James have said.
A really good example of this is when we look at the dark triad of personality (psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism or social manipulation), most studies have suggested that men score more highly than women, however these studies have primarily used undergraduate university students. When these studies are replicated in the general population (for example people not at university) the results tend to show that this is not the case.
Psychology does suffer with Eurocentricism (a focus on Western or European culture), a good example can be when we look at things like mindfulness – it incorporates a lot of Eastern meditation (from Buddhism) into its philosophy, and does show to be quite helpful. Often this gets “modified” to fit into busy Western life, and it becomes less effective.
We also see things like attachment style differ depending on if a culture is collectivist (cultures focusing on the group, often these are Eastern cultures) or individualist (cultures focusing on the individual, often these are Western cultures) but most of the research into attachment style has been done in the West!