Explaining Cross-Cultural Differences

Abstract

Contrary to the tradition in cross-cultural psychology in which bias is identified with the stimulus by culture interaction in an analysis of variance design, it is argued (and illustrated) here that any main effect or interaction term in such a design can reflect bias. It is suggested that difficulties in the interpretation of observed cross-cultural differences in data can be avoided only if the researcher succeeds in introducing external variables in terms of which the variance in the factor culture can be reduced to zero. This implies, somewhat paradoxically, that in a satisfactory cross-cultural study there is no variance left to be explained in terms of culture.