Ethnocentrism

12 Key excerpts on "Ethnocentrism"

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  21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook

  • Stephen F. Davis, William Buskist, Stephen F. Davis, William F. Buskist(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Researchers call this tendency Ethnocentrism (Berry et al., 2002), a phenomenon that is probably universal among humans (LeVine & Campbell, 1972) and that has been in the literature for about a century (Sumner, 1906). Ethnocentrism creates perceptions of dissimilarity between cultures, and contributes to negative stereotypes and conflict (Triandis, 1994). The term Ethnocentrism , interpreted literally, means judgments and feelings cen-tered (“centrism”) in one’s own cultural or ethnic (“ethno”) context or group (Brislin, 2000). It is related to sociocul-tural factors and to personal values, self-views, and emo-tions (Matsumoto & Juang, 2004), and often involves viewing those from other groups with suspicion (Price & Crapo, 2002). Thus, Ethnocentrism leads individuals to see behaviors, values, and norms of their own culture as cor-rect and those of other groups as incorrect; to view their own customs as universal; and to consider it natural to be cooperative with their own group and to distrust others (Triandis, 1994). Ethnocentric individuals see the world, and particularly others who may be different, from their own viewpoint (Thomas, 2005), prompting Matsumoto and Juang (2004) to use the metaphor of a filter or lens, “…distorting, rotating, and coloring” (p. 65) our image of the world, resulting in differing cultural perspectives that each seem equally valid to the individuals experiencing them, often without awareness of the limiting nature of their cultural filters. Children are enculturated into the society into which they are born, learning its rules, practices, and expecta-tions, and observing and interpreting the behavior of others. Individuals thus come to notice and to judge the behavior of others who may violate the accepted conventions of the group (Matsumoto & Juang, 2004), and it is only natural that people see differences between the in-group (one’s own group) and an out-group (the other) as deficiencies in the out-group (Berry et al., 2002).

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  Controversies in Psychology

  • Phil Banyard(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In our everyday lives we are asked to make judgments about people and events. We have a range of opinions that we are prepared to offer to other people when asked, and sometimes when not asked. In our judgments we are often inclined to show a little egocentrism (seeing things from our own particular viewpoint to the exclusion of others). Another bias that can affect our judgments is Ethnocentrism (seeing things from the point of view of our group). Ethnocentrism can be defined as the following syndrome of behaviours: a tendency to under-value the out-group’s products an increased rejection and hostility towards out-group members a tendency to over-value the in-group’s products an increased liking for in-group members (accompanied by pressures for conformity and group cohesion) (LeVine and Campbell, 1972) From an ethnocentric standpoint, we tend to see our own team as being best. Also, we underestimate the errors and failings in our own team and exaggerate them in the opposing team. There are a number of reasons for this, including our access to evidence. We are likely to know far more about the behaviour and opinions of people with whom we mix and people who are like us. Also, if we support people like ourselves then we are likely to receive support back from these people. We expect our friends to support us and not to do us down, particularly in the company of strangers. It is all to do with social cohesion and a sense of belonging. The downside of the ethnocentric outlook is that we are likely to show prejudice towards people who are not like us and not in our group. The early psychological theories of prejudice suggested that it came from childhood experiences and only affected a small minority of people. The theory of the authoritarian personality, for example, put forward by Adorno et al. (1950) described prejudice as a consequence of a failure to resolve childhood conflicts between children and their parents

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  Ethnocentrism

  Integrated Perspectives

  • Boris Bizumic(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Ethnocentrism in psychology

  Ludwig Gumplowicz, who introduced the concept of Ethnocentrism in the 1870s, argued that a successful social science must get rid of Ethnocentrism (Gumplowicz, 1895). He was optimistic about this possibility, saying in the 1890s that Ethnocentrism was beginning to decline as a result of progress in the social sciences: “Well, the modern sociology has shone into the face of the ghost of Ethnocentrism – and it begins to wane” (Gumplowicz, 1895, p. 2). Nevertheless, although Ethnocentrism had appeared to wane at one point, it has not disappeared, and writing over 120 years later in the American Psychologist, Hall, Yip, and Zarate (2016) lamented: “those studies that include ethnocultural diversity as a primary aim are often marginalized and directed to specialized journals. From our perspectives as clinical, developmental, and social psychologists, and as journal editors, ethnocentric research approaches that do not make explicit attempts to include diverse samples have dominated the field” (p. 41). These authors also mentioned that topics such as race, ethnicity, and diversity are rarely studied or even ignored in psychology, being mentioned in even less than 4% of the journal articles in top journals, such as Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, during the last 15 years.

  Thus, the influence of Ethnocentrism is pervasive, and Ethnocentrism affects not only those whom psychology studies, but also the study of psychology itself. Possibly the only discipline that has taken a strong stand against Ethnocentrism is anthropology – although whether it has freed itself, or could ever free itself, of Ethnocentrism is debatable (Brodkin, 1997; Embree, 1950; van der Geest, 2005). As shown in this book, psychologists have invested a lot of energy in studying Ethnocentrism, but there has been little study into how psychology suffers from Ethnocentrism.

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  Complete Psychology

  • Graham Davey, Christopher Sterling, Andy Field, Chris Sterling, Ian Albery, Chris Sterling, Ian Albery(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 , and the implications for this of a restricted sample set. The main concern therefore will be about representativeness and generalisation. Within this there are issues around whether psychology can be a universal study of mind and behaviour. Clearly, if psychology is studying universal aspects of behaviour, then it can be said with some justification that any set of ‘normal’ subjects is as good as any other. However, if psychology's object of investigation isn't universal then there may be problems with representativeness.

  Ethnocentrism arises because we identify with people like ourselves (our in-group) and tend to overvalue the outputs of our in-group (see Activity box 4.1 ). Against this, we tend to undervalue the outputs of people unlike ourselves (the out-group) and show hostility towards out-group members (Banyard, 1999 ). Because of this, Ethnocentrism is, to an extent, inevitable; however, awareness of it can help us to avoid enshrining it in psychological theories.

  Self-test:

  • What is Ethnocentrism?
  • In what ways is Ethnocentrism exhibited in psychology?
  • Why does Ethnocentrism arise?

  Androcentrism

  Androcentrism means a ‘male-centred’ approach.

  Traditionally, psychology has been dominated by male researchers studying male participants. It has been assumed that results from studies of male participants will simply generalise to females and little research has been conducted into women's experiences. A considerable amount of work has been done on gender differences (Etaugh and Bridges, 2004 ), but this has usually taken the androcentric view that women are inferior to men (see Focus point 4.1 ; Photo 4.1 ).

  Photo 4.1 Are gender roles the result of fixed biological differences, or are they determined by society?

  Search for differences

  Difference research investigating gender is an example of a common approach to psychology, which emphasises the search for differences. Psychological similarities between men and women outweigh psychological differences (Barker, 2003 ), but few psychologists investigate similarities. In part, this reflects the fact that research that finds differences is more likely to be published than research that finds similarities. However, there is also a long history of psychology belittling women. Representations of women within psychology include Erikson's view that women's self-concept is defined by their attractiveness and the search for a mate, while Freud accused women of being ‘the problem’ (Banyard, 1999

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  Us Against Them

  Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion

  • Donald R. Kinder, Cindy D. Kam(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  People vary from one another incrementally . It would be a mistake to conceive of Ethnocentrism as a type and to assume that people either are ethnocentric or that they are not. People are more or less ethnocentric. They vary in the degree to which they reduce the social world to in-groups and out-groups, to us and them. Ethnocentrism is a quantity, not a kind. 3 Ethnocentrism should not be interpreted as irrational, the twisted ex-pression of repressed hostilities and primeval fears. Ethnocentrism is not a sickness. We do not require a therapist’s technique to reveal it or psycho-dynamic processes to explain it. Ethnocentrism is normal. It is, one might say, a “natural” way to look upon the social world. Finally, Ethnocentrism is a general predisposition. It is in this respect that Ethnocentrism differs from prejudice. In contrast to prejudice, ethnocen-trism “has to do not only with numerous groups toward which the indi-vidual has hostile opinions and attitudes but, equally important, with groups toward which he is positively disposed.” Moreover, while prejudice is hostility directed at a specific group, Ethnocentrism refers to a “relatively consistent frame of mind concerning ‘aliens’ generally.” Thus when we turn from race prejudice or anti-Semitism or any other particular social animos-ity, on the one hand, to Ethnocentrism, on the other, we come face to face with “prejudice, broadly conceived” (Adorno et al. 1950 , p. 102 ). 4 Four Theories in Search of Ethnocentrism 9 e t h n o c e n t r i s m a s a c o n s e q u e n c e o f r e a l i s t i c g r o u p c o n f l i c t Defined this way, how might Ethnocentrism—prejudice, broadly con-ceived—arise? Looking for answers, let’s turn first to William Graham Sum-ner. As we noted in the introduction, Sumner introduced the term ethno-centrism into the social science lexicon. But we turn to him here because he also had interesting things to say about Ethnocentrism’s origins.

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  Error Without Trial

  Psychological Research on Antisemitism

  • Werner Bergmann(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  75. 2 William G. Sumner, Folkways, Boston 1906, pp. 12-13. 3 Robert A. LeVine and Donald T. Campbell, Ethnocentrism: Theories of Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes, and Group Behavior, New York, London 1972, p. 9. 4 Robert Michels, Materialien zu einer Soziologie des Fremden, Jahrbuch für Soziologie, Karlsruhe 1925, Vol. 1, pp. 269-319, p. 303. 5 J. Bernard, The Sociological Study of Conflict, inj. Bernard etal. (eds.), The Nature of Conflict, Paris 1957, pp. 33—117; Robin M. Williams, Racial and Cultural Relations, in Joseph B. Gittler (ed.), Review of Sociology, New York, London 1957, pp. 423-464. 6 Cf. for a critical view: Herbert Blumer, Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position, The Pacific Sociological Review 1, 1958, pp. 3-6, p. 3. 140 Werner Bergmann The term Ethnocentrism, in its everyday as well as its technical meaning, includes individual attitudes and emotions, social actions and institutions, and cultural symbols and ideologies. Correspondingly, research on eth-nocentrism is carried out in many different fields: in anthropology, eco-nomics, political science, sociology, and psychology. However, each of these scholarly disciplines has accused the others of determinism or reduc-tionism, and has claimed its own research to be the most relevant. 7 Avoiding any such claims, this section will be limited to the presentation of specifically group-psychological issues. It will be concerned with those psychological processes which form the basis of group relations or are part of such relations. 8 The original, exclusive, theory of a universal and seemingly natural tendency toward Ethnocentrism in human beings or groups put forward by Sumner has not been empirically verified. Therefore, researchers fol-lowing Sumner have looked for psychic, social-structural, and cultural factors which weaken identification with the individual's own group, i.

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  Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication

  • Jane Jackson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Through the process of primary socialization, children develop expectations and shared understandings about the most appropriate ways to behave in particular situations and contexts. From our parents, teachers, and religious leaders, we learn the social rules and ways of being (e.g., linguistics norms of politeness) that are preferred by members of our particular ingroup (e.g., ethnic group, religious group). We are exposed to the worldviews of those who are closest to us and form ideas about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’, etc. If we have limited contact with people who have a different cultural background, we may also assume that everyone does things as we do.

  The ingroup favoritism principle is closely linked to the notion of ethnocentricism, which derives from the Greek words ethnos, meaning ‘nation’ or ‘people’, and kentron, meaning center. The term Ethnocentrism was coined by William G. Sumner, an American sociologist, who observed the tendency of people to differentiate between their ingroup and outsiders in a way that privileges their own group members. He defined ethnocentricism as ‘[t]he sentiment of cohesion, internal comradeship, and devotion to the ingroup, which carries with it a sense of superiority to any out-group and readiness to defend the interests of the ingroup against the out-group’ (Sumner 1911: 11).

  While ethnocentricism can foster ‘ingroup survival, solidarity, conformity, cooperation, loyalty, and effectiveness’ (Neuliep 2018a: 753), tight ingroup ties can also lead to the distrust and denigration of outgroup members. Individuals with an ethnocentric or monocultural mindset may display empathy and concern about the well-being of ingroup members but view outsiders as inferior or insignificant and exhibit little concern about them. Ethnocentric behavior may be characterized by arrogance, vanity, and even contempt for people who do not belong to one’s ingroup.

  Ethnocentric thinking may cause us to make false assumptions and premature judgments about people who have been socialized in a different cultural environment. When we only draw on our own cultural (and linguistic) norms to evaluate unfamiliar practices (e.g., cultural scripts, sociopragmatic norms, customs, ethics, religious traditions), we are engaging in Othering and behaving in an ethnocentric way. We are ‘assuming that the worldview of one’s own culture is central to all reality’ (M.J. Bennett 1993: 30) and that our ways are the only

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  Ideas for Intercultural Education

  • S. Marginson, E. Sawir(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 C h a p t e r 2 Refusing the Other Psychology and Ethnocentrism Introduction: Cross-Cultural Psychology Intercultural education in the English-speaking countries could be much better than it is. Large populations of international students, drawn from a diversity of cultural backgrounds, offer an excellent starting point in evolving intercultural approaches. After that, the potential starts to crumble. Local education systems and people have been very slow to respond to the opportunity created by the interna- tional student presence and to engage in their own process of inter- cultural transformation. It seems that only the visitors are expected to gain from adjusting. The locals have nothing to learn. There is more than just laziness here. At the bottom of local complacency, this refusal to step through the doorway marked “intercultural” indicates a deep-seated unexamined belief that Western education and Western ways of life are always inherently superior. Ethnocentrism privileges one particular cultural standpoint over all others. In this complacent view of the world—one that is all too widespread in English language education systems—relations based on equal cultural respect become impossible and local teachers, administrators, student servicing per- sonnel, and students believe they have little or nothing to learn from other cultures or other education systems. One reason why this Ethnocentrism is reproduced and largely unchallenged is that it is repeatedly reinforced by much cross-cultural psychology, the main body of knowledge about international edu- cation used by institutions, teachers, and counselors. This is not to say that all cross-cultural psychology is ethnocentric, as this chapter Ideas for Intercultural Education 22 will make clear. Even less is it to say that all educators and counsel- ors are complicit in Ethnocentrism and in the systemic “Othering” (negative referencing as different) of internationals from non-Western backgrounds.

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  Culture across the Curriculum

  A Psychology Teacher's Handbook

  • Kenneth D. Keith(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Ethnocentrism: Our Window on the World  Dong, Day, and Collaço (  ) studied the potential role of multicul-turalism and intercultural communication sensitivity as predictors of ethno-centrism in a sample comprising mainly Caucasian and Asian Americans. They reported signi fi cant correlations between measures of Ethnocentrism, multicultural ideology, and intercultural sensitivity, and pointed out the prospect that increasing appreciation for multiculturalism and improving intercultural sensitivity (perhaps through community cultural experiences) could reduce Ethnocentrism. These ideas no doubt have promise, although the correlational nature of the research leaves unanswered questions con-cerning which of these measures may depend upon the other(s). Neverthe-less, e ff orts to reduce Ethnocentrism are perhaps one way to increase the likelihood that students will elect to study abroad, thus broadening their cultural experience (Goldstein & Kim,  ). Final Thoughts Ethnocentrism, while universal, is more or less evident in di ff erent cultures. Some studies have suggested, for example, higher levels of Ethnocentrism among Japanese (e.g., Neuliep et al.,  ) and Chinese (Li & Liu,  ; Pan,  ) students than among Americans. Pereira, Hsu, and Kundu (  ) measured Ethnocentrism in business students from China, Taiwan, and India, and found the highest levels of Ethnocentrism among those from mainland China, followed by Taiwan and India. These fi ndings are consistent with the notion that, while individuals from collectivistic cultures may not have as many ingroups as individualists, they may be more strongly attached to their groups (Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, & Lucca,  ). Although it may not appear in psychology courses as frequently as it could, the concept of Ethnocentrism is an important, if often unrecognized, aspect of human behavior.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination

  • John F Dovidio, Miles Hewstone, Peter Glick, Victoria M Esses, John F Dovidio, Miles Hewstone, Peter Glick, Victoria M Esses, SAGE Publications Ltd(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Racism by inclusion means that dominated societies have to lose their identity and are obliged to assimilate to dominant groups (Maquil, Demoulin, & Leyens, 2009). Either dominant societies reject dominated people or they absorb and assimilate them to the extent that dominated people conform to the powerful model. Interestingly, despite its centrality to bias-ing group realities, the term ‘Ethnocentrism’ is absent from the glossary and the index of two classic textbooks of social psychology: Foundations of Social Psychology (Jones & Gerard, 1967) and Social Psychology (Secord & Backman, 1964). It is widely present, how-ever, in the chapter on ‘Prejudice and ethnic relations’ of the second edition of the Hand-book of Social Psychology (Harding, Kutner, Proshansky, et al., 1954). This latter publica-tion is representative of the focus privileged by social psychologists at the time. For them, Ethnocentrism was principally an individual characteristic, nourished by socialization (and thus distally by culture). The ‘authoritar-ian personality’ (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, et al., 1950) represents the most famous example of this individual-difference approach. Ethnocentrism, along with anti-Semitism, fascism, and politico-economic conservatism, formed a central component of this personality syndrome. Later work by Pettigrew (1958) in South Africa and the Southern United States, however, revealed that ethnocentric attitudes had less to do with individuals’ underlying personalities than with the widespread and accepted beliefs of the group to which the individual belongs. In other words, the problem is not mainly a matter of personality but of constructed group realities. These findings led to explorations of the ‘social dimension’ of intergroup attitudes (Tajfel, 1984), which superseded individual 196 BASIC PROCESSES AND CAUSES OF PREJUDICE, STEREOTYPING AND DISCRIMINATION difference accounts (though see Altemeyer, 1998; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

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  Conceiving of Personality

  • Karen Halttunen(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 6 Ethnocentrism: Culture, Local Knowledge, and Universal Truth The brain, the culture, and the disciplines that study them comprise the outer limits or bookends, so to speak, of the human person. The leap from the human brain to human culture, and from neuroscience to anthropology, is immense, and the task of conceiving of it and of modeling just how one might get from one to the other occupies a substantial portion of this book. The diversity associated with major differences among cultures is argua-bly the single most important of the dimensions that are not adequately conceived of in existing theoretical conceptions of personality. However we choose to understand it, culture-related diversity is readily apparent to the casual observer compared to personality diversity related to history (chapter 3), gender (chapter 9), and the normal and pathological variants that charac-terize a particular culture (chapter 10). The effects of culture on conceptions of personality are apparent at several reciprocally interactive levels, ranging from the personalities of the theorists who construe the data, to their models of modal personality, personality deviation, and gender (Harre, 1981, 1984; Choi, Kim, and Choi, 1993). It is important at the outset to note that science itself is embedded in Western culture and that in choosing it as a model for viewing culture we are 62 Ethnocentrism 63 already making a cultural commitment, for its fruits are necessarily hybrids of insight about human beings generally with re-presentations of Western cul-tural bias. Of course this is no more true of science than of any epistemology, and Geertz (1979) cogendy refers to the result of all such systems as local knowledge. The theories of personality that emerge under such circum-stances, as I have mentioned, are what Heelas and Lock (1981) call indigenous psychologies.

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  Cross-Cultural Psychology

  Research and Applications

  • John W. Berry, Ype H. Poortinga, Seger M. Breugelmans, Athanasios Chasiotis, David L. Sam(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The justification for such an ethnic psychology being included in cross-cultural psychology is that most ethnocultural groups maintain distinctive cultural features, sometimes for several generations after contact or migration. This suggests that a comprehensive definition should also signal cultural change (which often results from contact between cultures), an aspect that will be consid-ered more fully in Chapter 13. We are now in a position to propose a general definition of cross-cultural psychology that will be used in this book: Cross-cultural psychology is the study: of similarities and differences in individual psy-chological functioning in various cultural and ethnocultural groups; of ongoing changes in variables reflecting such functioning; and of the relationships of psychological vari-ables with sociocultural, ecological and biological variables. A field of science is not only characterized by its definition; also of importance are the aims and goals. You can find a brief discussion on the Internet (Additional Topics, Chapter 1), including a statement of our own perspective, to make clear to the reader where we stand. Themes of debate Theme 1: Culture as internal or external to the person To what extent should culture be conceptualized as part of the person ( internal culture ), and to what extent as a set of conditions outside of the person www.cambridge.org/berry 6 Cross-Cultural Psychology ( external culture )? When we talk about European culture or Indian culture, we can refer to the mode of subsistence (how people make a living), the political organi-zation of society and/or other aspects of the ecological and social context; this is external culture. We can also refer to the ideas, philosophies, beliefs, etc. of the members of a culture; this is culture internal to the person.

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