Cultural bias refers to a broad range of problems when a person gives undue weight to their own culture, seeing social phenomena through its prism instead of adopting a more neutral, outside view.
Symptoms of cultural bias include:
- Assumptions that everyone shares the views of the speaker's culture on choices in language, gestures, acceptable topics, government, morality, or social taboos.
- Assumptions that the listener is familiar with concepts that the speaker's culture takes for granted. In English-language communities, this can manifest in the mention of political or pop culture references specific to the United States, or using Imperial units of measurement.
- Ignorance of one's privilege of being raised in a more technologically and culturally advanced country (so-called "first world problems"). In particular, it can lead to the dismissal of discrimination issues such as sexism as a "solved problem", disregarding the parts of the world where the situation with these issues is more grave.
- Justification of the culture's views on gender and gender expression as "inherent in humanity", ignoring other cultures where the practices in question have historically been different.
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