Biases in Psychological Research

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about biases, focusing in particular on: (i) gender bias and its origins in women’s mandated lack of involvement in research for a long period of time, leading to the legacy effect of men still being the primary population of scientific researchers; (ii) the alpha and beta biases within gender bias, the former exaggerating the differences between men and women and the latter minimising those differences; (iii) the continued issue of an overwhelming majority of widely acknowledge studies being based on white, industrialised, educated, rich and democratic (WEIRD) populations; (iv) culture bias, with a note to the IQ ‘crust’ test; (v) how we move forward in psychological research to eliminate these biases.

About the lecturer

Dr Ayoub Bouguettaya is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Dr Bouguettaya’s research interests are in social psychology and how knowledge from that field can be applied to others, particularly health, including how we can apply social identity theory to societal problems, as well as investigating the different perspectives one might take on those issues. Some of Dr Bouguettaya’s recent publications include 'The relationship between gambling advertising and gambling attitudes, intentions and behaviours: a critical and meta-analytic review' (2020) and 'The Effect of a Food Addiction Explanation Model for Weight Control and Obesity on Weight Stigma' (2020).