Sophia Morrison

Understanding across cultural groups requires adopting

To learn from and about communities other than our own, we need to go beyond the ethnocentric assumptions from which we each begin. Often, the first and most difficult step is to recognize that our original views are generally a function of our own cultural experience, rather than the only right or possible way.

The diversity of cultural ways within a nation and around the world is a resource for the creativity and future of humanity. As with the importance of supporting species diversity for the continued adaptation of life to changing circumstances, the diversity of cultural ways is a resource protecting humanity from rigidity of practices that could jeo

People often view the practices of other communities as barbaric. They assume that their community’s perspective on reality is the only proper or sensible or civilized one (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Campbell & LeVine, 1961; Jahoda & Krewer, 1997).

Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a washbasin in Australia and see the water spiraling down the hole the other way around. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.

Lev Vygotsky, a leader of this approach from early in the twentieth century, pointed out that children in all communities are cultural participants, living in a particular community at a specific time in history. Vygotsky (1987) argued that rather than trying to “reveal the eternal child,” the goal is to discover “the historical child.”

If the preponderance of the scientific evidence supports the recognition of gender/sex diversity beyond only two kinds, and the inclusion of gender identity in discussions of sex, why would someone argue otherwise? As a social psychologist, I believe the answer is quite simple: prejudice.

That is, the reality that we perceive through our sense organs is typically not the full story of reality. For example, our senses usually tell us that the earth we walk on is self-evidently immutable—it does not sway beneath our feet or perceptibly shift from day to day. It is “solid as a rock” as the saying goes. EO 14168 (2025) positions binary