Discuss the question of cultural relativism in relation to attempts to define abnormality
The question of cultural relativism stems mainly from psychology’s attempt to be a ‘science’. More specifically psychology’s attempts to establish universal laws about human nature; in this case a definition of abnormality that would apply to virtually all of the people all of the time. A number of attempts have been made to define abnormality yet all raise the question of cultural relativism (i. ... Some attempts to define abnormality and the question of cultural relativism will now be considered. Abnormality has been defined as any behaviour or characteristic that is statistically infrequent. ... This definition however clearly raises the question of cultural relativism because the normal distribution simply represents what is frequent and infrequent in the population the sample was representing and not a specific culture. ... For example, dieting behaviour is very common in female western culture and if the sample used for the normal distribution were western females then, for females at least, this behaviour would not be defined as abnormal because it would be statistically frequent but male behaviour would be as, compared to this cultural sample their behaviour (non-dieting) would be statistically infrequent – clearly a case of ‘lets see if they (males/other cultures) can do ‘our tricks’.