Ethnocentric bias, also known as ethnocentrism, is when one’s perception of others, particularly of different cultures, is heavily influenced by one’s own culture, to the extent that one judges them based on the standards and norms of a particular culture. This can easily lead to racism and xenophobia if their ethnocentric bias is so that one perceives their own culture to be superior to others.
One example of ethnocentrism is the Western culture of eating everything with cutlery such as knives and forks. This practice may seem out of place or foolish in Indian culture as Western cultures eat rice with spoons or forks whereas it is eaten with hands in India so they would consider that the correct way to eat rice, and cutlery superfluous.
Whilst this is a relatively trivial example, ethnocentrism can be extremely harmful if not restrained. Another example of ethnocentrism is colonialism. This is where political conquests lead to “cultural domination with enforced social change”. For example, the British conquest and control over India. They had little understanding of Indian culture and made no attempt to rectify this, instead imposing their cultures and practices on Indian society creating a lot of problems and unrest during their rule.
Everyone has instinctual reactions towards other people or cultures but acknowledging your potential ethnocentric bias and learning to check it and restrain it means that these reactions and biases never have to result in terrible events such as war or genocide. We must all try to practice cultural relativism and accept differences that other cultures bring and appreciate different cultures without viewing them as ‘odd’ or ‘inferior’ when in fact they are just different.
Written by Coco Clelland
Artwork by Mrishana
