Culture Differences

This week in class we talked about cultures, and about how people who are not exposed to different cultures will find it very surprising how different we are from everyone else. We learned about a Danish mother who left her child outside of a restaurant in New York, and as a class we all shocked and right away judged the woman for being "stupid," when really, she thought the Americans were stupid for bringing their babies into closed places that are not as healthy for the child as being outside. Both the Americans and the Danish woman, in this case, experienced ethnocentrism, which means they were harshly judging the other simply because it  was not what they were used to. My dad was telling me about when he went to Japan a couple of years ago, and he was in major culture shock for the first few days he was there because of how everything that seems like a normal, or every-day thing for them, is "weird" or "out of the ordinary" in the United States.