Research in cultural psychology suggests that mind and behavior are necessarily cultural. The implications of this perspective call into question assumptions of scientific psychology's cultural neutrality and indicate that it may be a form of cultural community in its own right. As such, it seems that it will necessarily be defined by certain cultural biases that are exclusive of other cultural biases. Nevertheless, providing that scientists can strive to identify their explicit and implicit cultural biases, and so long as they can define their sciences in terms of cultural biases that are rational and mandatory within the internal logic of psychology, psychology's specific cultural biases may enable them to advance knowledge in ways that other cultural approaches, such as religion or ethics, cannot. This paper suggests criteria for identifying whether any given cultural biases within psychology might be justified or unjustified and reviews exemplars of justified and unjustified implicit and explicit cultural biases. It also discusses how, in cases of unjustified cultural bias, alternative cultural perspectives can be instrumental in scientific advancement. Ultimately, the paper suggests that psychologists can be culturally inclusive without compromising the truly critical cultural biases that make psychological science worthwhile. Moreover, it suggests ways in which cultural inclusion may be beneficial for individual psychologists, the discipline of scientific psychology as a whole, and in how psychological science engages with other cultural communities.

What values, if any, is moral psychology based on with regard to what humans should be like? While the value-free ideal of science requires at least the bracketing of values in regards to the conducting of research and influence on its results, this investigation takes seriously the concerns of leading social psychologists that biases may influence the subdiscipline. Textual analyses of moral psychology's literature involving content analysis of codes and cultural discourse analysis of value themes illuminate values involving moral problems and moral goods that may inherently influence research at various levels. It is proposed that values are impossible to eliminate from moral psychological research and that a simple epistemic/nonepistemic value distinction is inadequate for deciding which values are appropriate. A norm of value disclosure to replace the norm of the value-free ideal is recommended.

This thesis explores what to have distorted scientific knowledge claims due to socially constructed conceptions of gender. Using the paradigm example of the explanation of human fertilization misrepresenting knowledge as it maps on stereotypes about the passive female and the active male onto the scientific participation of the egg and the sperm. Exploring arguments presented by feminist epistemologists, I argue that in order to produce knowledge free of distortions due to problematic social conceptions we must engage in a specific epistemological framework with three main components: 1) critically and systematically examine the subject of knowledge in relation to the object of knowledge, 2) make efforts to diversify inquirers as the perspectives of marginalized identities are important to informing where dominant narratives are failing to be objective and 3) actively acknowledge the role that values play in inquiry and promote feminist values. The framework presented is specifically applicable to knowledge distortions present in scientific inquiry but, importantly, can also inform individual epistemic relationship.