Читать книгу Multicultural Psychology - Jennifer T. Pedrotti - Страница 19

Though the word theory is really just a posited idea at its beginning, it can come to be thought of as “truth” as time goes on. As humans we tend to look for confirming evidence of things we believe (Heppner, Wampold, Owen, Wang, & Thompson, 2008), and that can leave us vulnerable to ignoring information that goes against our personal theories of life. In a field such as psychology, this confirmation bias continued to occur as psychology found its foothold in the United States but was still primarily a field dominated by White and European men. As time has gone by, some of these posited ideas have hardened and crystallized, carrying with them the weight of multiple studies and tests, though culture was still not often attended to. Unfortunately this scientific racism led to a number of crystallized ideas that perpetuated the deficit models. These ideas, however subjective and culturally bound, have influenced the pillars of our understandings of a variety of human behavior. As David Matsumoto and Linda Juang (2017) state,

Understanding how cultural diversity can color the nature of truths and principles of human behavior delivered in the halls of science questions the pillars of much of our knowledge about the world and about human behavior. From time to time, we need to shake those pillars to see just how strong they are. (p. 3)

Today, one of the main goals of psychology must be to shake these pillars and to make sure that cultural context is attended to.