[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, dear podcast listeners, this is Joseph
[00:00:04] Speaker B: and this is Ishita.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The podcast team is off this month. We'll have a new episode next month.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: So we wanted to share one of our favorite episodes from season three, Ethnocentrism.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: A lot of our listeners are teachers and trainers and you should know that if you go to the Japan Intercultural Institute website, you can find ready made materials to teach about ethnocentrism using this episode.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: And I think this topic is super important now. There has been deep intolerance in so many places around the world.
So check it out and we'll see you next month with a new episode.
I was seven years old, playing in the schoolyard with my friends when I first heard it. It's claimed that my family was from a certain caste.
It caught me off guard. I had never heard it discussed at home.
Why did others put me in a category that I didn't even know existed?
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Hello, this is Joseph Scholz and welcome to the Deep Culture podcast where we explore culture and the science of mind. And I'm here with Emre 7. Hi, Emre.
[00:01:30] Speaker C: Hi, Joseph.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: It's a pleasure to be hosting this episode with you, Emre. I'm recording this at home here in Tokyo. How are you doing?
[00:01:39] Speaker C: I'm glad to be here again with you. I'm in Sivas in Turkey.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: So, Emre, our theme for this episode is ethnocentrism. People often have strong reactions to this word. Is this something you talk about to your students, Emre?
[00:01:56] Speaker C: Yes, it is. I frequently talk about how ethnocentrism clothes our judgment and I give some real time examples. And how about you, Joseph?
[00:02:06] Speaker A: I do talk to my students about this. Sometimes I ask them directly, are you ethnocentric?
[00:02:13] Speaker C: That's a rather touchy question, isn't it?
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Well, it is a touchy question because, you know, in some situations, if you ask, are you ethnocentric, people might think that you are accusing them of being prejudiced.
[00:02:27] Speaker C: I agree with you. But there is another way of thinking about ethnocentrism.
We can see it as something natural, just part of how our mind works.
And if you look at from that perspective, we are all ethnocentric.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: And that raises the question, is ethnocentrism primarily natural or is it learned?
And so we'll dig into ethnocentrism in this episode. We'll argue that brain and mind sciences offer a pretty clear answer to this question. We'll also look at research that shows that intercultural Educators and trainers don't seem to have consensus about this.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: And that brings us to part one. Reporting the Facts.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: So, Emre, let's start with a question from a survey carried out by the Japan Intercultural Institute.
Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
I believe that ethnocentrism is something we learned from our environment, so it can be overcome with education.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: Take a moment to think about.
Is ethnocentrism natural and thus unavoidable, or is it something we learn from our environment?
If you believe ethnocentrism is learned, then maybe education or the right attitude can overcome it. If it's a natural part of how our mind works, then it's not so simple.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: And this survey was given to intercultural professionals, trainers and teachers, and 75% of intercultural educators agreed that ethnocentrism is learned and can be overcome by education.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: I must say I was a bit surprised because personally I disagree.
I think ethnocentrism is natural, but a lot of educators had a different view.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Obviously this word can mean different things to different people.
So let's start by looking at definitions of ethnocentrism. Merriam Webster defines it as the attitude that one's own group, ethnicity or nationality is superior to others.
[00:05:05] Speaker C: That sounds like a prejudice, like you feel you are better than others.
And it is true that every society has some negative attitudes about certain groups.
So we do indeed learn to look down on certain people.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: So maybe that's why many intercultural educators feel that ethnocentrism is learned. But let's dig a bit deeper, because ethnocentrism is not a simple thing, and so we need to look at more than that simple definition.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: I'm interested in the way that anthropologists look at ethnocentrism. Anthropology was first conceived of as the scientific study of culture, and this was in the late 19th and early 20th century.
One important goal was being objective, and
[00:05:58] Speaker A: this was a time when anthropologists would set off to faraway places to study cultural communities.
But they discovered that the idea of studying different cultures objectively was difficult, or maybe even impossible, because we invariably see the world through our own cultural glasses.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: And that is ethnocentrism looking at things through the familiar lens of our previous experience and cultural worldview.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: And this is so common, we experience it anytime. We make a value judgment about some cultural difference. And it can be the smallest of things.
[00:06:39] Speaker C: Yes, I remember years ago I noticed my own ethnocentrism at breakfast when I was traveling in France at breakfast when
[00:06:48] Speaker A: you were traveling in France?
[00:06:50] Speaker C: Well, the tour guide had mentioned that there was a buffet breakfast, which I was really excited about.
But when I approach the table, I see there is only croissant, coffee and cheese.
And I thought, is that all?
Man, that's no buffet.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: And so why wasn't this a buffet?
[00:07:20] Speaker C: Because in Turkey, a good breakfast is often seen as having a lot of different ingredients and they are all served together.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Well, you know, I have no experience with breakfast in Turkey, so I did a Google image search for Turkish breakfast, and sure enough, I find photos with all kinds of things. There's olive, cheese, bread, eggs, salad things, coffee.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: Exactly.
And so that was a quote unquote normal breakfast for me. A croissant, coffee, cheese.
You know, that just wasn't enough.
It wasn't what I expected.
It wasn't normal.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: And so from the anthropological point of view, this is at the core of ethnocentrism, the feeling that what is familiar to me is normal and anything else is somehow wrong or not up to standard.
It has also been defined as a bias or tunnel vision in which an individual views the world from the perspective of his or own group, establishing the group as archetypal and rating all other groups with reference to this ideal.
[00:08:34] Speaker C: Exactly. The image of breakfast in my head was an archetype, a kind of mental model, and it was based on my experience and my expectations.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: And of course, we have a strong tendency to make a negative judgment about things that don't meet our cultural standard. So you were disappointed, Critical, maybe of the breakfast buffet in France?
[00:08:59] Speaker C: Yes. And worse yet, my experience in France was years ago.
And since then I think I've learned a lot of things about intercultural understanding.
But not that long ago, even a few years ago, I was in Morocco, and once again I found myself inwardly feeling critical of the breakfast that I found there.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: I have been living in Japan for many years, and typically if there's a breakfast buffet, you find food like rice, porridge, fried fish, miso soup. But that still doesn't feel like breakfast to me. I still want bacon.
[00:09:38] Speaker C: And so this is something that anthropologists discovered, that we always carry our cultural glasses with us, and yet most often we don't even notice them.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: One odd thing about ethnocentrism is how invisible it often is. Somehow when we're making ethnocentric judgments, we feel like we're just reporting the fact.
But often there's a negative value judgment involved. So, for example, you somehow found Turkish breakfasts superior to the breakfast buffet you found in France.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: Yes. But I also have seen something else.
We sometimes make ethnocentric judgments against our own society or community, because I sometimes hear Turkish students say that, oh, Turkish people are not good at that.
Or, oh, if something comes from Japan, it must be good.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Ethnocentrism is grounded most fundamentally in the unconscious assumption that there is a single standard by which things are judged.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: If there is a single standard of right or normal, you don't recognize that your perceptions depend on your previous experience.
And that raises the question, why is this so?
What is actually happening in our mind when we are being ethnocentric?
[00:11:06] Speaker A: And that brings us to part two, naturally ethnocentric.
So let's take a look at the cognitive architecture of ethnocentrism. What's going on in our heads.
[00:11:31] Speaker C: And perhaps the most fundamental process related to ethnocentrism is something referred to as predictive processing.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Our mind navigates the world using internal models. We're constantly making unconscious predictions about what we experience.
And the world is often a predictable place. So when you flip the switch, the light comes on. It's all automatic.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: If every time we saw a light switch, we had to think about turning on the light, we would constantly be overwhelmed.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: So instead, we're constantly anticipating what will happen next. And ethnocentric reactions are a natural result of predictive processing, because our expectations about how the world works or how it should work come from our previous experience.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: So predictive processing is kind of the starting point for ethnocentrism.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: But ethnocentrism is not only a product of predictive processing. It is also deeply rooted in our mind, and it is held in place by a number of natural cognitive cognitive biases.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: When we use the word cognitive bias, we're talking about the many ways in which our minds naturally take shortcuts, pass judgment, overgeneralize, jump to conclusions, pay attention to certain things, and ignore others.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Cognitive biases are ways for us to make quick judgments that are good enough most of the time.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: One cognitive bias that is closely related to ethnocentrism is the familiarity bias.
This is sometimes called the mere exposure effect, and that refers most simply to the fact that what is familiar is often experienced as more positive than something that is different or unknown.
And then there is the confirmation bias,
[00:13:50] Speaker A: and that's the tendency to look for information that confirms what we already know or believe. So, for example, I've heard people say, oh, what I learned from going abroad is that I'm glad that I was born in America or Japan or whatever.
[00:14:04] Speaker C: Their foreign experiences reinforce their feeling of cultural superiority.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: And then there's a desire for cognitive ease, what I like to call the McDonald's effect.
When I was first traveling in Asia years ago, I was in Hong Kong. And I remember walking the streets and being fascinated by everything I saw.
But as I started to get hungry and tired, I happened upon a McDonald's.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: And you went in? Of course.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Well, I did go in. And I remember thinking to myself, why am I going in here? What am I doing? I'm here in Hong Kong, but I'm going to have a Big Mac.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: But this is a common experience.
Cognitive ease refers to the fact that things that are familiar to us require less cognitive processing, and that gives us a sense of comfort and reassurance.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: So ethnocentrism is rooted in predictive processing, and it relates to a number of cognitive biases. Familiarity bias, confirmation bias, cognitive ease.
And together with all this, we have one of the most powerful of human biases, the in group bias.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Yes, we have a natural tendency to favor people that are similar to ourselves.
We are social primates. And the in group bias triggers a sense of togetherness.
And this is a core survival mechanism.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: And everyone has experienced the in group bias. For example, sports fans feel solidarity with others who support the team.
We naturally want to defend our friends, and we gossip with people we know as a way to bond.
And we're often suspicious of those who look or think differently than we do.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: And ethnocentrism goes hand in glow with the in group bias.
People who are perceived as the other are seen as less legitimate and more worthy of suspicion.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: For me personally, there's something disturbing about how ethnocentrism creates solidarity, because as we favor our in group, we create community.
But that also creates barriers to understanding others.
[00:16:28] Speaker C: And this is something that our podcast team member, Ishita Rai, has experienced. Versant.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: It is difficult for me to take ethnocentrism lightly.
I live in India, a country that is celebrated for its diversity of culture and languages, but where time and again there has been conflict and unrest. Because of these differences, ethnocentrism has literally cost lives over and over again.
And yet ethnocentrism is natural, a collective survival mechanism.
It is the glue that holds communities together.
India is a highly networked society.
Daily life here means confronting a harsh reality of scarce resources and a dense population.
This creates strong community bonds and social stratification as people at the top compete for status, while those at the bottom compete for survival.
The fact is, ethnocentrism often feels good.
It gives a sense of security and solidarity in a hostile world filled with quote, unquote others.
I, for example, grew up surrounded by the idea that I have a right to condescend the language of my neighbors.
There were countless conversations at lunch, at dinner, where friends, family poked fun at Hindi for conjugating verbs based on the gender of the subject, Urdu for pronunciations that exercise the epiglottis, Tamil for being the language you could master only if you had pebbles in your mouth, Konkani for being the fisherman's Marathi. The list could go on and on.
Thus the idea that my language is the standard was reinforced and then casually invalidating other languages. We were invalidating the lived experiences of the people of those communities.
And because our ethnocentric instinct is primordial, so visceral, it becomes a breeding ground for prejudice.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: This is a powerful thought.
Ethnocentrism is a breeding ground for prejudice.
It's the primordial instinct that intolerance is built on.
[00:19:26] Speaker C: These days we find ethnocentrism being manipulated in many places in the world.
Politicians who talk about the threat of the other, of the enemies who seek to destroy us, they are taking advantage of this psychological response for their own gain.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: And it's a reminder that ethnocentrism is in the end, a form of collective self protection.
And this is why we easily fall prey to it when we feel threatened.
[00:19:58] Speaker C: And this is true for all of us. As podcast team member Daniel Glins recounts,
[00:20:08] Speaker D: I feel that we tend to become most ethnocentric whenever we are verbally attacked, insulted, or simply referred to in a negative way.
I feel it has a lot to do with pride and self esteem. I remember a young, rather arrogant woman who came from a small city in Germany and who started started to work in the International Committee of the Red Cross.
She commented, the food supermarkets in Switzerland have much less choice than in Germany.
The quality is good though, but there is much less choice.
I vividly remember that I felt hurt by her comment as a Swiss, and that my reaction came as a total surprise to me. I had never expected that something like a negative comment would touch me, but when I think of it, it is the way she said it, rather than what she said that irritated me.
She had used a condescending tone of voice deep in our collective unconscious. The Swiss are quite sensitive when they are being looked down by either the French and especially by the Germans, our two biggest and strongest neighbors whose languages we share.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: It's amusing to think of Daniel feeling bothered by someone's comments about Swiss supermarkets. But, you know, we've all had experiences like this, so we've been talking about the mental processes of ethnocentrism. But let's get back to this question in this survey. Can ethnocentrism be overcome by education?
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Personally, I clearly don't think so. It's a very deep part of our mental functioning, of our evolutionary psychology.
[00:22:04] Speaker A: But this also raises a question, because it may be true that ethnocentrism runs deep and can't be completely overcome.
But clearly not everyone is equally ethnocentric.
[00:22:18] Speaker C: It's obvious that some people really do judge less. Some people look at things from multiple cultural perspectives, and some kind of perceptual shift does seem possible.
And what can we do to move beyond ethnocentrism?
[00:22:37] Speaker A: And that brings us to part three, the paradigm shift.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: We will always judge things based on our previous experiences. We will always have cognitive biases.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: But that doesn't mean we are completely a prisoner of ethnocentrism. We can learn to look at the world with new cultural glasses.
It's possible to undergo a kind of paradigm shift. We experience a fundamental change to how we view the world.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: And rather than judging things from one absolute standard, we learn to accept and respect that there are other ways of looking at things. Joseph, how have you experienced this?
[00:23:36] Speaker A: When I was in my early 20s, I was living in Zacatecas, Mexico, and I started noticing something odd When I would cross the border to take a flight to Zacatecas, I would have this sensation that I was transition into a different world. And this included a feeling of separation that my American friends couldn't really understand what it was like for me in Mexico, and my Mexican friends couldn't really understand what it was like for me in California.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: Well, I remember a similar set of feelings when I returned from the US To Turkey. When I stepped in the airport in Istanbul, I felt like I was not the me who left from there four months ago. I came back as a new person with a new way of looking at the world.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: And that raises the question of what's actually happening in our minds during experiences like this.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Well, one simple insight that has been powerful for me is that cultural learning is a process of pattern recognition.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: So when we're in a familiar environment, we can easily read the patterns around us.
But in a foreign environment, our normal interpretive frameworks don't work so how do we make sense of these new patterns?
[00:25:04] Speaker C: And the ethnocentric answer is that we continue to use our existing interpretive schema.
We judge new patterns based on our familiar standards.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: But it's also possible for us to somehow create a new, seemingly separate mental structure, an alternative set of interpretive patterns.
[00:25:28] Speaker C: So, living in Mexico, you developed a new set of interpretive patterns which you experience as separate, just as I experienced when I came back to Istanbul.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: And for me, this idea has also helped me make sense of all the. Aha. Moments that we have during foreign experiences, because once we have seen a pattern, we cannot unsee it.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: But then why do some people spend years abroad but never really manage to understand the local perspective?
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Yes, that's interesting, isn't it? Someone can be surrounded by cultural patterns for years, yet never fundamentally change their perspective. It's as though ethnocentrism wins in the end.
But I also think that there's the opposite phenomenon. My wife Ayako, for example, told me that when she arrived in Los Angeles on her first trip to a foreign country, she was shocked by the bathroom doors at the airport because they didn't extend all the way to the floor. And she thought, well, what kind of place is this where you can see people doing their business in the bathroom?
But she also says that a kind of light went off in her head, and she had this realization that this was really a whole different world. And she decided then and there that she wanted to try living in a foreign country.
[00:27:02] Speaker C: So, on the one hand, some people live abroad for years and seem quite stuck in ethnocentrism, and others have a small foreign experience, and it has a big impact.
It can bring about a fundamental shift in perspective.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: To go beyond ethnocentrism, there needs to be a fundamental acceptance of the legitimacy of other cultural worlds. We have to go beyond our tendency to split the world into us and other.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: And one person on our podcast team who has experience with this is again, Ishita Rai.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: I was seven years old, playing in the schoolyard with my friends.
When I first heard it, exclaimed that my family was from a certain caste.
It caught me off guard.
I had never heard it discussed at home.
Why did others put me in a category that I didn't even know existed?
It was deeply disturbing. I was angry.
When I got home from school, my father was in the kitchen cooking.
I blurted out what my schoolmates had said. I looked straight into his eyes.
Is that true?
He paused, turned off the stove, took me to the living room, sat down with me.
Are you any different than you were this morning?
No, I said.
Did the words your friends use change you?
No.
So you see, he said, looking into my eyes, these words that people use to talk about you, they have nothing to do with who you are.
I now know that my father sought to inoculate me in some small way from a toxic process of othering.
Once you have been labeled, you cannot unknow the category that people put you in. You cannot change the attitudes that go along with it.
And yet my father was telling me that I was not the label.
Yes, the label was a reality of the society that we lived in, but he did not attach any value to it.
Instead, he drew my attention to my relationships with those I love, my experiences in the world, the friends who had labeled me. In this way, my father, an educator with every bone in his body, taught an important lesson that day.
I learned to ignore the label, to pause, to pay attention, to look for more than one side to a story.
And that when we do, we see a situation, we see a human being.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Wow, what a story.
And what a delicate task to tell a 7 year old how to look beyond these ethnocentric labels, these prejudicial labels that she hears.
It strikes me that Ishita's father needed to reassure her.
She was feeling defensive and she needed to feel secure.
So going beyond ethnocentrism in some form requires that we don't feel threatened by these new ways of making sense of the world, that it enriches our lives.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: And this fits with the research into empathy, the ability to look at the world from the perspective of others.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: And we have talked about the research into empathy by Jamil Zaki on this podcast before.
In effect, our ability to empathize with others is motivated. That is to say, it can be turned on by positive feelings and turned off by negative feelings.
And this reminds us that we can take on new perspectives and we can expand our sense of cultural self.
And Daniel Glintz has a lot of experience with this.
[00:31:52] Speaker D: I remember feeling my cultural self expand after some time living in a foreign country.
My first exotic experience was as a student in China and later in Japan and in India.
I remember developing a feeling of solidarity and even belonging to those countries.
I remember feeling sad and touched when something bad happened to them on the political, social or economic level.
I guess that to some extent I started to feel part of the bigger group, as if somehow my loyalty had shifted to my host country.
More recently, since I've been learning Turkish, I react defensively when somebody makes a negative comment about Turkey.
And this is not just an intellectual exercise, learning a foreign language is a big investment.
It expands our identity. It expands our cultural self. It requires somehow letting go our own mental and grammatical structure, and it creates a distance from the original in group.
This is a subtle shift, but I have felt it very clearly.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: So I really like Daniel's practical perspective on this.
You know, when we invest ourselves in our foreign experiences, when we learn a foreign language, this can all help us go beyond ethnocentrism.
[00:33:42] Speaker C: So, Joseph, we've covered a lot of ground today. We started with the question of whether education is enough to overcome ethnocentrism.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: And I think it's safe to say that ethnocentrism is a natural part of how our mind works.
And it is encouraged by the prejudices that we learned growing up. It is reinforced if we feel threatened and it can be manipulated.
[00:34:08] Speaker C: On the other hand, when we have positive experiences with cultural difference, we are more likely to accept that there are other normals that should be accepted and respected.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: And that's probably a good place to bring this episode to a close.
But before we do that, let's mention some of the sources we've been relying on today.
The research we mentioned about the attitudes of intercultural educators was carried out by the Japan Intercultural Institute. The data from that survey is available upon request. Just contact jii.
And for more information about empathy being motivated, check out a motivated account by Jamil Zaki. Our definitions of ethnocentrism came from an Oxford Bibliographies entry written by Elizabeth Baylor. The Deep Culture podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute. If you liked today's episode, spread the word on social media and you can write
[email protected] thanks to the whole JII team, our sound engineer, Robinson Fritz, and everyone else, Yvonne van der Poel, Zaina Matar, Ishita Rai, Danielle Glintz, Ikomi Fritz, all the members of gii. And of course, thanks to you, Emre, for sharing this time with me.
[00:35:32] Speaker C: Thank you, Joseph. It was really great.
