Question

Please explain ethnocentrism and prejudice and provide personal examples to support your explanation.

Please pick one cultural dimension that you are interested in and explain it with an example.

What are some of the similarities you see across cultures?

Answer 1

Ethnocentrism is a belief that one's own culture and heritage are superior to that of other races, regions or countries. It also involves judging the other races and treating them as inferiors. For example, Hitler believed that Jews who belonged to a different community from him to be inferior and that they did not deserve to live. Similarly few people might consider immigrants to be inferior to them.

Prejudice is a preconceived opinion regarding anything. There will be no logic, facts or actual experience behind the opinion. It addition it tends to be negative and unpleasant. For example, people who are born and brought up in one country might have negative opinions about people from other countries. Another example is of parents not agreeing to marry off their children to people from other religions.

Cultural dimension

Uncertainty avoidance cultural dimension shows the level of comfort people have in facing unstructural problems and unplanned events which are not routine and are surprising. Cultures with uncertainty avoidance believe in strict rules, laws and code of behaviour. Anything which is deviant from the expected bahaviour is not tolerated. People from a culture with strong uncertainity avoidance tend to plan each and every event and they will be really intimidated when something unplanned occurs.

Similarities across culture

• People across cultures do some work in order to earn a living.
• A few decades back, women were treated as inferiors in most of the cultures.
• Justice and truth are valued in all the cultures
• Goal of acquiring wealth and leading a safe and secure life is also something common across cultures.