Psychology: Investigating the Impact of Psychological Biases - Essay Sample

Introduction

Psychology is a broad field of study, which entails numerous experiments, inquiries, and investigations on various social, political and economic aspects of the members of society. These investigations, experiments, and inquiries play a critical role in academic psychology. However, there are many setbacks when establishing truths and findings over psychological subjects. Psychological bias is one of the main aspects that scuttle the effort of carrying out psychological inquiries, investigations, and experiments. Bias is a term, which refers to an individual's (either a researcher or an investigator) act of developing pre-meditated attitudes towards a particular aspect of investigation or research. Bias is known to have contaminated most psychological findings to the level of giving wrong perspectives of many research outcomes. Such an adverse element of academic psychology is what drives the research to inquire some of the most common sources of academic psychology biases. The list of the sources of bias in educational psychology is quite long. For example, there is racism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism, ageism, heterosexism, bias from the methodology, and socio-economic exclusion, which is also referred to as classicism, among others. Nevertheless, this discourse focuses on the three primary sources of bias, which are racism, ethnocentrism, and androcentrism. The discussion further expounds on the viable approaches towards overcoming or mitigating on the three sources of academic psychology biases.

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Racism

From a general point of view, racism refers to the belief that one race is superior to the other. As a result, persons of the perceived superior race exhibit antagonism, prejudice, and discrimination towards a person of a perceived inferior race. In most cases, the skin color is what serves as a distinction when ascertaining the racial traits of an individual. Besides, racism makes people develop a notion that all people of a particular race possess characteristics, qualities or abilities that are equal in measure (Jones, Dovidio, & Vietze, 2013). Racism is a source of bias in academic psychology since it affects the outcome of many psychological processes carried out by most psychologists. It works as a source of bias in several ways. When a person of a particular race, for instance, white race, is researching a group of workers in a specific institution, he or she will want to offer preferential treatment to persons of the race that he belongs. When researching on the behavior of employees in the institution, researchers of white race often try to collect data that portrays white workers as persons who do not engage in harmful activities in the institution (Jones, Dovidio, & Vietze, 2013). However, the research would want to paint a bad picture of the other races in which he or she does not belong. This decision is informed by the fact that the researcher has a predetermined notion that people from his or her race possess superior traits, values, and abilities within the institution. In a school setting, a researcher who may want to ascertain the nature of the learning ability of students would also get inclined towards his or her race. When investigating the intelligence quotient of students in a school made up of whites, and other races, a researcher from the white race would want to portray white students as possessing higher intelligence quotient (IQ) compared to other races. This perception compels a researcher to record wrong values when collecting statistical data of students. If he is to award marks depending on how students conduct themselves in class and outside class, such a researcher would prefer allocating more marks to students who belong to his or her race as a result of racism bias (Jones, Dovidio, & Vietze, 2013).

The case of Yerkes' mental testing of army recruits offers a typical example of how racism serves as a source of bias in academic psychology. Yerkes used manipulations of scientific variables to portray army recruits who were of the non-white race to be of a low intelligence quotient compared to the whites. In his quest, Yerkes established three major tests whereby literate recruits could seat for an exam known as Army Alpha (Valencia, 2012). The illiterate ones could take an exam called Army Beta, which was a pictorial examination. Those who did not pass the Army Beta examination were subjected to another review, which they would take personally. In the examination, Yerkes asked students to point and fix some pictures, and in this exercise, he rated students whereby he concluded that Mongoloids were of high intelligence quotients followed by Caucasoid from southern Europe. He rated Negroes on the lowest scale (Valencia, 2012). Racism as a source of bias in academic psychology leads to the assumption of some scientific facts. The most common example is that of the Evolution Theory. Evolution is a scientific process that attempts to explain the origin of human beings. It states that humans emerged from a cell, which formed organs that developed structures to become organisms. In this case, human beings developed their structure to advance to the level witnessed in contemporary society. However, studies in evolution have been tainted by racist beliefs that a particular race has undergone advanced stages of evolution compared to other races. For instance, the Mongoloids believe to be miles ahead in terms of evolution stages. This assumption does not augur well with the scientific findings, which places all humans to be at per as far as evolution stages are concerned.

Overcoming Racism as a Bias Source

Racism is a problem that has been in existence for quite a long time. The presence of many races on the globe has contributed towards competition as each race aspires to get superior over others. There is a need to prevent racism from interfering with psychological academia by use of several approaches. For example, society should consider eliminating racism among communities or nations. Governments in collaboration with world bodies like the United Nations should intensify their fight against racial discrimination by establishing stringent rules and regulations that can deter racism and its effects. Stringent measures such as hefty fines and imprisonment should be laid down to ensure that people who propagate racism are brought to book. Once racism is minimized, racial inclinations in researches related to psychology will also come to an end. Another mode of ending racism in psychological research is for the research society to be keen on characteristics of racially biased scientific findings. Instructors of research papers should look at the data, analyses, and conclusions with a keen eye to detect any element of racism-instigated outcomes or results (Valencia, 2012). Heavy punishment, for example, the cancelation of papers or discontinuation of students from studies should be in place to scare away students or researchers who engage in racial bias in their academic works. Another way of deterring racially informed research papers is to deny their publication on the internet. The internet's major stakeholders like Google ought to omit articles that are inclined towards individual races in their findings.

Androcentrism

Androcentrism is another common source of bias in psychology academia works. Androcentrism is a conscious, sub-conscious or otherwise culture, which places people of the male gender in a vantage point in aspects like culture, history, and general life intending to raise the status of the male society members at the expense of their female counterparts (Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004). Essentially, androcentrism advocates for the welfare of the masculine to the exclusion of the feminists. For instance, androcentrism will see several activities done in favor of men and ignore the existence of females. With regards to academic psychology, androcentrism plays a critical role in undermining studies of this discipline (Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004). This phenomenon undermines most scientific findings when researching particular tenets of psychology. There are several scenarios where androcentrism interferes with research within the psychology field. For example, historically, men are known to be actively involved in the construction of houses and other structures. Females were not known for being been actively engaged in constructions. This trend is attributable to the fact that constructions were marred by heavy duties that women could not manage to carry out. However, contemporary society has invented machines for construction. Jobs have been rendered easy, and the female gender can now carry out initially tough jobs such as constructing. However, assuming that someone is carrying out a study on the level of production on a constructions site, he or she is likely to rate female workers' production levels at low rates compared to their male counterparts simply because women are not traditionally associated with the work of constructing. No matter how amazing some females could work and deliver results at the site, the chances of lauding their work are minimal due to the androcentrism, which places women under the thumb of men in various chores. Similarly, the society has designed men to be the heads of homes in most families. Today, there are many factors that have led to many ladies leading a single life away from their husbands. Therefore, these ladies are forced to take up the roles of men or husbands. When placed on the balance by a researcher who is influenced by androcentrism, he is likely to record findings to be that ladies who stay with husbands are more successful compared to the single ones. Even though this finding could be untrue, the fact that the society perceives females who are under the care of men as successful makes the researcher to resonate with such a societal conclusion (Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004).

For a long time, authors of books, journals and other scholarly texts have been driven by androcentrism. Most of the content of their lucubration have been referring to the male gender as opposed to being neutral. Alarmingly, studies or reports that focus on the female group have also been written from the male perspective, especially when using pronouns. In scientific reports, the 'he' pronoun is conspicuous compared to the 'she' pronoun. Such revelations underscore the rate at which scholars have been affected by androcentrism in their academic psychology. Androcentrism is also evident in the historical content related to psychology (Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004). Sigmund Freud, for instance, came up with the Personality Development Theory, which focuses on the males at the exclusion of females. This theory seems to address the male gender issues without considering the existence of the female gender. In his explanation of the stages of sexual development, Freud mentioned oral, anal, latency, phallic and genital development (Freud, 2016). He narrated sexual activities and the pleasure that they occasion on a particular part of the male body. In this theory, Freud failed to appreciate the presence of female children's development since his explanations had little to do with the development of the girl-child. From the findings, there is cogent evidence that Freud Sigmund was influenced by andocentric bias given that he did not consider the status of the female gender. In his view, addressing the aspect of the male gender would be representative of all other kinds of genders. Unfortunately, there is a stark discrepancy among genders whereby the finding of one gender does not apply to the other gender in many matters.

Overcoming Androcentrism Source of Bias

As explained in the preceding section, androcentrism does not augur well wit...