Restricted access

Review article

First published online December 7, 2010

Culture and the Home-Field Disadvantage

Douglas Medin [email protected], Will Bennis, and Michael ChandlerView all authors and affiliations

Volume 5, Issue 6

https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610388772

Abstract
Reference

Abstract

The home-field disadvantage refers to the disadvantage inherent in research that takes a particular cultural group as the starting point or standard for research, including cross-cultural research. We argue that home-field status is a serious handicap that often pushes researchers toward deficit thinking, however good the researchers' intentions may be. In this article, we aim to make this home-field bias more explicit and, in doing so, more avoidable. We discuss three often-overlooked disadvantages that result from this home-field status: the problem of marked versus unmarked culture, the problem of homogenous versus heterogeneous culture, and the problem of regression toward the mean. We also recommend four interventions researchers can apply to avoid the home-field disadvantage or, at the least, attenuate its deleterious effects.

Get full access to this article

View all access and purchase options for this article.

Notes

Reference

Atran S., Medin D.L. (2008). The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bennis W.M., Medin D.L. (2010). Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder: Commentary on Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 85–86.

Boster J. (2005). Emotion categories across languages. In Cohen H., Lefebvre C. (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 188–223). London: Elsevier.

Brumann C., Abu-Lughod L., Cerroni-Long E.L., D& x00027;Andrade R., Gingrich A., Hannerz U., et al. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded [Special issue]. Current Anthropology, 40(Suppl.):S1–S27.

Canadian Institute for Health Research. (2007). CIHR guidelines for health research involving Aboriginal people. Ottawa, Canada: Author.

Chandler M.J., Lalonde C. (1998). Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada s First Nations. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35, 191–219.

Cole M., Scribner S. (1974). Culture & thought: A psychological introduction. New York: Wiley.

Fiske A.P. (1993). Structures of social life: The four elementary forms of human relationscommunal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing. New York: Free Press.

Galinsky A., Magee J., Ena Inesi M., Gruenfeld D. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17, 1068–1074.

Gentner D., Goldin-Meadow S. (2003). Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Harris M. (1976). History and significance of the emic/etic distinction. Annual Review of Anthropology, 5, 329–350.

Henrich J., Heine S., Norenzayan A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–135.

Kirmayer L. (1994). Suicide among Canadian Aboriginal peoples. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 31, 3–57.

Khberger A. (1998). The influence of framing on risky decisions: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 75, 23–55.

L& x000F3;pez A., Atran S., Coley J., Medin D., Smith E. (1997). The tree of life: Universals of folk-biological taxonomies and inductions. Cognitive Psychology, 32, 251–295.

Medin D.L., Atran S. (2004). The native mind: Biological categorization and reasoning in development and across cultures. Psychological Review, 111, 960–983.

Nisbett R.E. (2003). The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently and why. New York: Free Press.

Proffitt J.B. (2000). Expertise and category-based induction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 811–828.

Ross N. (2004). Culture and cognition: Implications for theory and method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rozin P. (2007). Food and eating. In Kitayama S., Cohen D. (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Shweder R.A., Jensen L.A., Goldstein W.M. (1995). Who sleeps by whom revisited: A method for extracting the moral goods implicit in practice. In Goodnow J., Miller P., F. Kessel (Eds.), Cultural practices and contexts for development (pp. 21–39). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Trope Y., Liberman N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110, 403–421.

Tversky A., Kahneman D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458.

|

You currently have no access to this content. Visit the access options page to authenticate.