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This chapter reviews the historical development of the world opiate market, including the international policy regime that surrounds it. It explores the period of growth of the opiate market in the nineteenth century, the decline that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century and the re-emergence and transformation that occurred during the latter part of the twentieth century. Historical evidence suggests that changes in policies especially the first and second International Opium Conventions of 1912 and 1925, played a part in the major reductions in opium consumption that occurred during the first half of twentieth century. The analysis of international and domestic drug control efforts indicate that increasing control and prohibition of opiates reflected cultural biases of western societies and governments.

This chapter talks about complexity that places a premium on evidence and judgement, the ability to question, and learn and adapt. It points out how institutions matter in complexity and elaborates how policymakers use institutions to establish and prioritise particular values, norms, rules and roles to reduce the complexity of choice. It analyzes Cultural Theory (CT), which allows researchers to examine the role of institutions in structuring how policy actors make sense of their environment. The chapter addresses challenges through CT's parsimonious framework, which constitutes institutions in rivalrous cultural biases. It claims that theory provides common frames of reference that benefit the work of policy scholars, including their engagement with practical policy.

This chapter highlights some of the salient points in each of the book's five topical sections. It seeks to demonstrate, with concrete recent examples, that cultural bias significantly distorts the study of peace and war. Rather than relax the striving for objectivity and the canons of science, addressing this serious problem means developing a greater awareness of the powerful grasp that cultural beliefs have on research related to peace and war, striving for self-awareness of one's own beliefs and biases regarding this topic, and applying the rigors of well-practiced science to one's own research and to the assessment of the findings of others.

The eighth chapter evaluates Davis’s work on intelligence-testing, which marked the culmination of his social thought and the height of his social influence. In 1948, Harvard invited Davis to give its prestigious Inglis Lecture in education, which Davis then did and had published as Social-Class Influences upon Learning (1948). This rich, compact volume synthesized Davis’s research from the previous two decades, but it emphasized his latest findings from the project on intelligence testing that he spearheaded at the University of Chicago. Davis and colleagues such as Robert Havighurst developed the first quantitative studies of the cultural biases within intelligence tests, which they showed to be discriminatory against lower-class people. Davis’s findings faced stiff resistance from psychologists such as eugenicist Henry E. Garrett and testing companies like the Educational Testing Service. Yet Davis’s iconoclastic work nevertheless galvanized educators and school boards all across the country to revise or abolish their use of the traditional tests. Even more, Davis’s work helped initiate a national debate regarding issues of social class, ability, fairness, and opportunity within the United States, which helped to foment major changes during the social movements of the 1960s.

This paper examines key institutional and economic forces driving the rapid extension of the use of Western models of diagnosing and treating mental illness into all corners of the developing world. It examines the ways that problems in the American psychiatric research system, notably, ethnocentric biases and untoward economic influences, appear to be mirrored in the emerging international system, and how these may undercut the promised benefits of expanded mental health care to communities across the globe. It approaches these issues by examining the changing treatment of socio-cultural issues in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] and the International Classification of Diseases [ICD]. While identifying persisting problems in the main body of the DSM-V, the paper notes the significant progress in thinking about the socio-cultural dimensions of mental health represented in the Cultural Formulation Interview included in the appendix of the work. Drawing on research from cultural and multi-cultural psychology, cultural psychiatry, and medical anthropology, the paper maps several out possible steps for establishing more responsive and well-grounded mental health practices to serve diverse communities within the United States and across the world.

This chapter explores the development of Matsigenka Indians character and interpersonal relations in household-centered families. It explains that the main dilemma of Matsigenka family life is balancing the selfish and willful desires of the individual against the compromises required for life in household and hamlet. It discusses the emphasis on the independence of individuals and nuclear families which runs counter to the common anthropological position that individualism is an egocentric, Western cultural bias.

This chapter considers developments in two industries related to the U.S. daytime soap opera: Latin American telenovelas and U.S. primetime drama. It gives special attention to two biases that have played out in the critical reception of U.S. primetime series adapted from telenovelas: gendered bias against the soap opera format and ethnic/cultural biases against telenovela content.

Chapter 9 reconsiders the findings of the book’s study by replicating its main statistical analyses using a conventional and widely used survey self-report measure of happiness as a dependent measure, the Satisfaction with Life Scale developed by Diener and colleagues. While showing important areas of convergence with the book’s models developed using the Scale of Intrapsychic Brightness and Darkness, results show that this conventional measure introduces and fails to detect social desirability and cultural biases in participant responses. The chapter illustrates and accounts for these biases using qualitative and quantitative evidence. This finding raises concerns about reliance on survey self-reports to study happiness. In the book’s research use of self-reports alone would have led to significant omissions and distortions in findings. These limitations are compared with use of the book’s new qualitative method of assessing well-being. The new approach offers a viable alternative to conventional happiness research reliant on self-reports.

This chapter examines the cultural biases embedded in critiques of Mandopop. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan's popular music swept across China. Many in the PRC government reacted to the values embedded in Taiwan's lyrics with mistrust and disdain, expressing a fear that Taiwan and Hong Kong's cultural incursion would result in the PRC's loss of national identity. In Taiwan, people complained of Mandopop's fast pace and changing nature and linked this to similar trends in Taiwan's society. More recently, several Taiwanese scholars have critiqued Mandopop for promoting patriarchal gender roles, and English-language publications complain of a lack of individualism in that songs are produced in teams of composers, lyricists, and performers. The chapter examines the cultural contexts of these critiques in order to obtain a better understanding of what is, after all, the most popular Chinese-language music in the world.

Deliberation encourages participants to reason with one another chapter 6 details how cultural biases often impede such reasoning. Cultural predispositions are an indication of people’s beliefs along two dimensions: hierarchical-egalitarian and individualism-collectivism. The first relates to whether government should regulate individual behavior and the second to whether government should provide a social safety net. US political parties and subsequent policies map onto these dimensions, with Republicans more likely to identify as hierarchical individualists and Democrats more likely to identify as egalitarian collectivists. As outlined here, deliberative processes, such as the CIR and Deliberative Polling, ask participants to overcome their cultural predispositions in the interest of reaching the best decision possible. Deliberation can produce such results, particularly when the available evidence clearly favors specific policy proposals. On values-based questions, however, deliberative participants may ultimately rely on their cultural cognitions to reach decisions.

After deep and wide-ranging study and extensive writing, Hegel’s conclusions regarding the beauty of Indian art, the sublimity of Indian religion, and the complexity and significance of Indian philosophy may precisely have led to his bias vis-à-vis his own system of philosophy. Self-contradictions arise in his writings. Hegel had inherited (and perpetuated) many of the vices of his era: racism, chauvinism, religious bias, sense of cultural superiority. But, his philosophical bent enjoined repeated engagement with the newly discovered treasures of Indian philosophy, and his irrepressible intellectual hunger and curiosity engendered his study of Indian mythology, history, art, and religion. In fact the uneasy resemblance of Indian philosophy may have posed a deep threat to him. The chapter concludes that whatever objective evidence presented itself to the contrary, nevertheless the logical framework of his philosophical system demanded, for its tenuous success, that Indian thought be merely emergent, nascent, childlike—representative of the morning Spirit.

Chapter one describes “The Quandary Over Plant Sex” in its historical context. The sexual role of pollen wasn’t discovered until the late 17^th century, suggesting a deep cultural bias. Beliefs concerning sex in humans, from Galen and Aristotle onward, were influenced by gender ideology. The lower social status of women suggested a one-sex model, whereby female character and physiology were construed as deficient versions of the male. Plants, because of their association with women, came to be regarded as female. Flowers are often emblematic of women in literature, but flowers seem to produce fruits without carnality, by parthenogenesis. In paintings of the Annunciation, the lily appears almost as regularly as the angel Gabriel as a symbol of Mary’s purity. The association of flowers with female purity hindered the discovery of sex in plants. Although most people are aware of pollen, widespread confusion about its role in sexual reproduction still lingers.