Culture-Fair Cultural Approach To Psychology

Culture is something that often times gets forgotten about as people go on in their daily lives explaining this and that about how things work yet forgetting a key component as to how this and that got to how to be where it is today. Culture is all in the details, as it provides the backdrop and enriches every aspect of… well, everything. Art, history, medicine, science- all of it was enriched by culture so of course how can we forget about psychology?

Culture can be summed up as the shared behaviors, beliefs and creative works of a certain group of people (Cohen et al., 2005). As pointed out in the article, “Culture-Fair Cognitive Ability Assessment: Informative Processing and Psychophysiological Approaches” more ethnic students are placed in special education programs and a very low number of ethnic students are placed in gifted programs. Caucasian American students usually score higher on standardized intelligence tests compared to both African American and Mexican American students which questions a bias in said testing. The article goes on to test this bias by

Language is just one example of this as we all speak different ones and even use different forms of nonverbal cues. What is taken as a positive form of nonverbal communication in one part of the world is entirely different in another- like direct eye contact. Shaking hands when greeting a new person is another example of something that is often thought of as a universal positive nonverbal way to communicate, but in many countries it is disrespectful depending on where you are at, which hand you are shaking and other factors. Being that the US is a very individualistic country we tend to think- as previously noted- that if it is “universal” here than it is universal everywhere else. This creates a very biased way of thinking in terms of assessing someone and diagnosing (Cohen et al.,