okay so you go over to a friend's house and you get served up a plate of crispy fried insects so how do you respond to this well how you do 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 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 and one of the things that we're doing here is that we're judging your friends 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 i can see why he likes this dish it might not be for me but i can see why he likes it and what are we doing here we are actually again assessing and judging our friends culture but from a different viewpoint we're judging and understanding the culture from within their culture and these different perspectives that i've um outlined that's why i drew this semi-circle that you could see here because really how we view these fried insects how we view them is down to our own um the kind of cultural perspective that we take and these different cultural perspectives actually have their own terms so one term that i want if we're going to judge another person's culture from our own culture and really to say things like you know this is disgusting this is right or this is wrong whether it's to do with food religion politics any customs or rituals or anything else what we're doing is we're becoming very ethnocentric and 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 um or cultural phenomenon from a perspective of the other person's culture we start to move into the concept of cultural relativism and 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 relativism can somewhat falter if someone uses it to um conduct activities that really violate the rights and dignity of our fellow human beings no matter what culture they are in or from so something important for us to also consider now based on our insect dish i want to talk to you a little bit about groups and what i want to do is talk to you about groups by mentioning how we by splitting up i want to talk to you about groups and how groups are formed so let us take this first group over here and this group will think that insect insects are pests and they're not to be eaten so let's draw a few different people that could be part of this group and the second group really thinks of insects as dinner and let's draw a few of them over here okay so so the reason why groups form is that people within groups share psychological 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 can be related to anything at all right so let us let us label these groups so if we are in in if we are actually in this group ourselves this is let's label this us and let's label the dinner group then let's let's use some more formal titles so 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 and then becomes something called the out loop and what we know is that people in the in group demonstrate um a lot um a lot stronger interactions than people who are in the out group than the interactions with people who are in a different and uh in their so these interactions occur and the other thing is that not only are these interactions stronger but then um or more common but they may potentially be more influential as well but sad 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 so what do i mean by that in ingot favoritism we tend to favor people who are in our group who share whatever this psychological attribute is that we are feel connected to so in this circumstance we are very friendly towards the people in our in group but what about what about the people outside what about the them the out group what do we do towards that well the people in our 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 that and that's called out group derogation and in out group derogation what we find is that again we are super friendly and super nice to out in group but when it comes to when it comes to the out group we are not so friendly we actually mean we might actually discriminate and and this tends to happen outgroup derivation can actually happen if we feel that the the out group is in some way threatening to undermine or stop our in-group from achieving success and one last thing i wanted to mention is the idea of group polarization now 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 so the group's opinions and actions and decision making may actually become more extreme than what their individual members wanted this can effectively turbocharge any of these other processes that are going on and and also turbocharge the group's 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