Sociologist William Graham Sumner (1906) coined the term ethnocentrism to refer to the tendency to assume that one’s own culture and way of life represent the norm or are superior to all others. (Richard T. Schaefer - Sociology_ A Brief Introduction-McGraw-Hill Humanities Social Sciences Languages (2012)) Ethnocentrism is a major factor in the divisions among members of different ethnicities, races, and religious groups. One's ethnic group is superior to another. Ethnocentric individuals believe they are better than other individuals for reasons based solely on their heritage.
Clearly, this practice relates to problems of both racism and preconception. It is accentuated by two other phenomena, which are also probable : (i) we have a tendency toward naive realism which limits our capacity to appreciate the extent to subjective (Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995); and (ii) we have a tendency toward false consensus, which is to think that other humans agree with our positions more than is true, and disagree with our position less than is true (Kruger & Clement, 1994).as an example we can analyze the different country of our world, the united states of America always has the propaganda that they are the best and the greatest nation in the world, while china consider itself empire of the center, it is also seen in our society, the people one region in our country thinks that there culture practice, way of life, education is better than other existing regions, ethnocentrism is the term of domination and it can create conflict between people, so there is no collaboration or confrontation in ethnocentrism, it seems it best to analyze it with the conflict theory of great Karl Marx, as he said burjoas always tries to dominant the worker class, the ethnocentrism states the same way of thinking in society, the realistic sociologist of new era assumes that ethnocentrism happens due to 'real or perceived conflict' between groups. This also happens when a dominant group may see a new group as a threat to their kind, sociologist discovered that they are more comfortable in inner circle and response the outer circle with negativity.
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Although the causes of ethnocentric beliefs and actions can have varying roots of reason and context, the effects of ethnocentrism had both negative and positive effects in society. The most dangerous effect of ethnocentrism can lead a humble society to accept the situation like genocide, slavery, apartheid, and many violent conflicts. And the historical events like holocaust, crusades the trail of tears are the living example of it. These events were started by ethnocentric believes and gradually became conflicting and reason of hatred ,a result of the hatred turns into a mass destruction and killing for nothing but a thought of cultural superiority, from early age of history to today ethnocentric believes lies in the deep part of our society, and some time it creates many harmful situation, the historical event claim that it tore apart the brotherhood between societies across the world, and the silent characteristics of ethnocentrism should be vanquished for the betterment of society.
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