By Jason Hreha

Glossary

Ethnocentrism

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 3 min read

A manager asks employees in two offices for candid feedback. The people in one office disagree directly. The people in the other raise concerns more indirectly. If the manager treats directness as the natural form of honesty, the second group may look evasive. If someone in the second group treats restraint as the natural form of respect, the first may look rude.

Both judgments begin in the same place: a familiar cultural standard has become the measuring stick.

What is ethnocentrism?

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to use one’s own ethnic or cultural group as the reference point for understanding and evaluating other groups. The customs, values, and social rules of one’s own group can feel normal or self-evident. Other ways of doing things are then judged as deviations from that standard rather than as practices with their own history and logic.

The word is sometimes used loosely to mean prejudice. That is too narrow. Ethnocentrism can support contempt or discrimination, but it can also appear in quieter judgments: whose manners seem professional, which family structure seems proper, what counts as reasonable disagreement, or which way of organizing time seems responsible.

Nor is every preference for a familiar custom ethnocentric. You can prefer the food you grew up with without deciding that unfamiliar food is inferior. The important move is not familiarity itself. It is treating your group’s standard as the natural standard for everyone.

The hidden reference point

Ethnocentric judgments often disguise a comparison as a description. “They are unfriendly” may mean that they do not greet people in the way my group does. “They do not value family” may mean that their obligations are arranged differently from mine. “They have no work ethic” may rest on a local idea of punctuality, individual initiative, or the proper boundary between work and family.

This does not mean that all customs are equally good or that comparison is impossible. Some practices cause clear harm. Some institutions work better than others for a stated purpose. The problem is a standard that goes unexamined. Before concluding that another group falls short, it helps to say what the standard is, why it fits the question, and whether it would still seem fair if another group supplied it.

Ethnocentrism and ethnocentric bias

Ethnocentric bias usually refers to a biased judgment that reflects ethnocentrism. The broader concept includes a group-centered way of understanding the social world, not one isolated error in perception or memory. For that reason, ethnocentrism is best treated as an intergroup concept that can produce biased judgments, not as one neatly bounded cognitive bias.

A cross-cultural study by Boris Bizumic and colleagues described ethnocentrism as a form of ethnic-group self-centeredness. Their account includes expressions such as ingroup preference and claims of group superiority. That is a larger territory than the simple claim that people occasionally misread an unfamiliar custom.

A newer theoretical framework places ethnocentric bias among several effects that may grow from the belief that one’s own group is a reasonable reference. That is a useful hypothesis. It is not proof that every form of ethnocentrism has one cause, or that ethnocentrism reduces to a single information-processing mistake.

How is ethnocentrism different from ingroup bias?

The ideas overlap, but they ask different questions. Ingroup bias is preferential treatment or judgment of people who belong to one’s group. Ethnocentrism concerns the group itself as a center of value and interpretation. You can favor an ingroup member without using the group’s culture to judge everyone else. You can also make an ethnocentric judgment about an outgroup without choosing between two individual people.

Ultimate attribution error is narrower still. It concerns explanations for good and bad behavior by members of different groups. Ethnocentrism can feed those explanations, but it also reaches language, customs, institutions, and beliefs that are not explanations of a person’s behavior.

Examining an ethnocentric judgment

The useful question is not simply, “Am I biased?” That invites a quick no. Start with the comparison instead:

  • What behavior am I evaluating?
  • What standard am I using?
  • Where did that standard come from?
  • Would people in the other group describe the situation the same way?
  • Is the standard tied to the outcome I care about, or does it merely feel familiar?

These questions do not make every disagreement disappear. They make the reference point visible. That is often the part of the judgment that was hiding.

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