Cultural Bias

Cultural bias is the tendency of individuals to interpret and judge other people's experiences through the lens of their own cultural background, considered a central problem across the social and human sciences, including economics, psychology, anthropology and sociology; practitioners in these fields have attempted to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate it. Cultural bias arises when people of a given culture make assumptions about conventions, including conventions of language, notation, proof and evidence, and then mistake those assumptions for universal laws of logic or nature; it can be either intentional or unintentional, since drawing conclusions about human behavior within these disciplines can unintentionally embed cultural bias into the resulting science. Documented cultural biases concern norms for color, mate selection, concepts of justice, linguistic and logical validity, the acceptability of evidence, and taboos.