- [Voiceover] Okay, so you go over to a friend's house
and you get served up a plate of crispy fried insects.
How do you respond to this?
How you respond really depends on whether
you normally eat crispy fried insects or not.
Is it part of your culture to have this dish?
If it isn't, let us think of the different
ways in which you can react.
One of the ways you can react is to say,
"Oh, my gosh, this is disgusting!
"This is wrong, I don't want anything to do with this."
One of the things that we're doing here
is that we're judging your friend's culture
from the position of your own culture.
What's the alternative way
that we can actually judge a situation?
One of the other things we can say is,
"Yeah, you know what?
"I can see why he likes this dish."
It might not be for me,
but I can see why he likes it.
What are we doing here?
We are actually, again, assessing and judging
our friend's culture, but from a different viewpoint.
We're judging and understanding their culture
from within their culture.
These different perspectives outlined ...
That's why I drew this semicircle
that you can see here,
because, really, how we view these fried insects,
how we view them is down to our own,
the kind of cultural perspective that we take.
These different cultural perspectives
actually have their own terms.
One term that I want,
if we're going to judge another person's culture
from our own culture,
and really say things like, this is disgusting,
this is right or this is wrong,
whether it's to do with food, religion,
politics, or any customs or rituals, or anything else,
what we're doing is we're becoming very ethnocentric.
What being ethnocentric means
is that we are really judging our own culture
to be superior to that of others.
On the opposite side,
as we start to look at cultural events,
whether it's the food or any other cultural event,
or cultural phenomenon,
from a perspective
of the other person's culture,
we start to move into the concept
of cultural relativism.
What cultural relativism means,
is that there's no right, absolute right or wrong,
but we have different cultures
who are themselves valid.
Cultural relativism can somewhat falter
if someone uses it
to conduct activities
that really violate the rights and dignity
of our fellow human beings,
no matter what culture they are in or from.
That's something important for us to also consider.
Now, based on our insect dish,
I want to talk to you a little bit about groups.
What I want to do is
talk to you about groups by mentioning ...
I want to talk to you about groups
and how groups are formed.
So, let us take this first group over here.
This group will think that insects are pests
and they're not to be eaten.
Let's draw a few different people
that could be part of this group.
The second group really thinks of insects as dinner.
Let's draw a few of them over here.
The reason why groups form
is that people within groups share
some kind of psychological connection with their peers,
so that could be related to their love of insect dishes
or it could be related to politics,
it could be related to spirituality,
any other cultural issues.
It could relate to anything at all, in fact.
Let us label these groups.
If we are actually in this group ourselves,
let's label this "Us"
and let's label the dinner group "Them."
Let's use some more formal titles.
Instead of saying "Us" we can actually
refer to this as the "in" group,
the group that we are in,
and the group that we are kind of psychologically
most connected with.
"Them" becomes something called the "out" group.
What we know is that people in the "in" group
demonstrate a lot stronger interactions
than people who are in the "out" group,
then their interactions with people who are in
a different, in the "out,"
so these interactions are weaker.
The other thing is that not only are these
interactions stronger, or more common,
but they may potentially be more influential as well.
But certain funny things can kind of happen in groups.
One of the things that can happen
is we can have something happen called
in group favoritism.
What do I mean by that?
In in group favoritism, we tend to favor
people who are in our group,
who share whatever this psychological attribute is
that we feel connected to.
In this circumstance, we are very friendly
towards the people in our "in" group.
But what about the people outside?
What about the "Them," the "out" group?
What do we do towards them?
With the people in the "out" group,
we are actually dead set neutral.
We don't extend them the favor.
We don't go out of our way to help.
We're not nasty or horrible or unkind,
we just don't give them the favors
that we do to our "in" group.
Now, there's another phenomenon
where we might be a little bit nastier to the "out" group,
and that's called out group derogation.
In out group derogation what we find
is that, again, we are super-friendly
and super-nice to
our "in" group, but when it comes to
the "out" group, we are not so friendly.
We're actually mean.
We might actually discriminate.
This tends to happen,
out group derogation can actually happen
if we feel that
the "out" group is in some way threatening
to undermine or stop our "in" group
from achieving success.
One last thing I wanted to mention
is the idea of group polarization.
This is a phenomenon where
the decision-making machine, that is the group,
makes decisions that are more extreme
than any of the individual members
would be inclined to make.
The group's opinions and actions
and decision-making may actually become
more extreme than what their individual members wanted.
This can effectively turbo charge
any of these other processes that are going on,
and also turbo charge the groups' viewpoints.
For example, if the group thinks insects are pests,
are they going to set up a fumigation society
for the local neighborhood?
I mean, I'm saying that in jest,
but, you know, I hope the point is made.