By Jenna Hoff
Are practitioners of conflict resolution too quick to jump to “culture” to explain away behavioral differences that occur in their conflict resolution work? Culture is a salient consideration in a diversity-informed conflict resolution practice, and rightly so: psychological and behavioral norms can vary widely between cultures, and conflict resolution practitioners have worked in recent decades to expose and mitigate the white, western context in which much of the field’s scholarship originated. However, when we talk about culture, we often fail to remember that culture affects everyone, not just members of minority groups and cultural outsiders. Additionally, misplaced focus on culture can lead us to neglect information about individual differences that can interfere with effective conflict intervention.
Recently published research has found that American psychologists tend to overemphasize the role of culture and under-emphasize individual differences when they analyze the behavior of minority individuals, whereas when analyzing white individuals they often downplay or disregard culture altogether. An analysis of research participants from studies in the last 10 years showed that research on culture included a higher proportion of minority individuals than would be required to obtain a representative sample of the general population. A survey of American psychologists showed similar trends: when asked to evaluate hypothetical study designs which used either all-white or all-minority participants to study behavior relative to culture and individual psychology, psychologists (regardless of race) tended to approve of all-minority groups as appropriate samples for studying culture, and white groups as more appropriate for examining individual psychology.
The danger in what the study’s authors are calling “culture (mis)attribution bias” is that by overemphasizing culture with minorities, we erase or ignore their individuality. And by under-emphasizing culture with white individuals, we both fail to note cultural differences between white groups and lose the potential insight that study of white culture(s) might offer. The differential treatment betrays a lingering bias that considers white people as individuals but essentializes minorities as a homogenous group. Both oversights can jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of conflict interventions, especially among diverse stakeholders, and they make our practice less trustworthy and less effective for everyone.
Causadias, J. M., Vitriol, J. A., & Atkin, A. L. (2018). The cultural (mis) attribution bias in developmental psychology in the United States. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication.
