Reader’s Question

I am doing research for a lecture that I am going to be giving, and I need some help. I’m wondering if there is a psychological or technical term for knowledge that a particular social group or generation possesses, which they believe everyone in every other group or generation should also be familiar with. An example might be a 20-year old person who has grown up in a world with cell phones and simply can’t comprehend a time when people didn’t have cell phones or had familiarity with them. In my way of thinking, this is somewhat analogous to “ethnocentrism,” where one believes that “how we do it in our ethnic group or culture is right and how other people do it is wrong” — but applied to knowledge and science as opposed to cultural or ethnic norms.

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

This is a very interesting question. There are many different terms that tangentially address the issue you raise, but there doesn’t seem to be a precise term that completely captures it. Ethnocentrism, as you correctly note, involves the belief that the ethnic or cultural norms to which one subscribes are superior to others. Culturocentrism is a term also used to describe this phenomenon. The term technocentrism is used to describe the belief that technology has supreme value because of its ability to affect, control, and protect the quality of human life. Similarly, scientism promotes the view that a scientific outlook or philosophy is superior to all other interpretations of life’s realities.

What you seem to be describing, however, is a sort of narrow-mindedness or tunnel vision in which a person simply can’t imagine or appreciate the different mindsets of others who might not have been steeped in the same technological or cultural environment. This is a sort of environmental centrism that might impair a person’s ability to appreciate just how different the world views might be for others in different cultures, social and technological environments, or different periods of history. It might even be a sort of chronocentrism, in which a person is so enamored of the present time and circumstances that they fail to see how anything could have been any different at other times or believe that if things were different, they were certainly inferior to the way things are now. Such centrisms would certainly keep a person from fully appreciating what life is or was like for people who lived in a time or atmosphere in which our present technological realities were absent.

Finally, what you appear to be describing is not actually a centrism rooted in a felt superiority of one perspective over another, but rather a failure to “see beyond” what has become so commonplace and familiar within a particular time and culture.

In the absence of a definite, singular answer to your question, perhaps the issue you raise would be a great springboard for discussion in your lecture. I know it got my mind going!