User:Scandrettew/sandbox

Ethnocentrism is the act of judging another culture based on preconceptions that are found in the values and standards of one's own culture – especially regarding language, behavior, customs, and religion.^[1][2] These aspects or categories are distinctions that define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.^[3] Not to be confused directly with Racism or Prejudice but is more relative to terms such as Cultural Relativism.

The term Ethnocentrism was first applied in Social Sciences by American Sociologist, William G. Sumner. in his 1906 book, 'Folkways', Sumner describes Ethnocentrism as; "the technical name for the view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it." He further characterized ethnocentrism as often leading to pride, vanity, the belief in one's own group's superiority, and contempt for outsiders.^[7]

Overtime, Ethnocentrism would develop alongside the progression of social understandings most notably by social theorist, Theodore W. Adorno. In Adorno's studies examined in his 1950 book, 'The Authoritarian Personality', Adorno and his Colleagues of the Frankfurt School established a broader definition of the term as a result of "in group-out group differentiation'. and that Ethnocentrism "combines a positive attitude toward one's own ethnic/cultural group (the in-group) with a negative attitude toward the other ethnic/cultural group (the out-group)". Both of these juxtaposing attitudes are also a result of a process known as Social Identification and Social Counter-Identification.