Is there some effect that forces humans to judge things and people according to the conception of their own image?

Question

I remember of having read that such effects do exist, but I don't remember where.

If that is true or if the hypothesis exist, I'd like to have references about it.

Answer 1

Egocentrism may be the more general answer. The fundamental nature of conscious human experience is individualized, such that everyone's perspective is anchored to oneself in many ways. One such way is through the influence of our senses, which receive information about life from points within our bodies (obviously). This is probably the majority of the information we have about life, so needless to say, it's influential. Since we basically always accompany our sensory organs, we are ourselves our own most familiar stimuli in many ways. Familiarity again implies influences on our own judgments about other things that might involve comparison to the information we have about the rest of the world, and the especially rich information we have about ourselves. This extends to more abstract aspects of ourselves such as behavior, cognitive features, personality, etc.: we observe our own much more often than we observe others, so we know it best. This provides us with a somewhat biased pool of information that disproportionally represents our own natures (or at least, our images thereof), yet this is the only pool of information we possess and can use to inform our judgments, so bias due to subjectivity and egocentricity is somewhat ubiquitous and inevitable.

Our attention is also anchored to our own concerns via our emotional systems and self-senses (e.g., hunger, fatigue, pain, comfort) in ways that we can't fully control or ignore. These facts inevitably bias our judgments to involve more complete information about our own concerns than about anyone else's. Even if one were to give no higher priority to one's own concerns despite this (most people usually do prioritize their own needs above others somewhat; this is probably adaptive and even pragmatically prosocial to some extent), one's concerns would still bias the pool of information one uses to judge others' concerns via over-representation in that pool of info. Our emotions and natural senses prevent us from ignoring our own concerns, and also encourage us to try to address them, whereas we lack this directly consequential connection to others' concerns. We can ignore them more easily and willfully, or we can simply remain ignorant of others' concerns passively by never seeking information about them that is independent of information we have about ourselves. Both of these pathways lead to further reinforcement of natural, partly inevitable egocentrism in motivation, values, goals, attitudes, beliefs, etc.

Answer 2

Judging something by your standard is evaluating another's culture based on your shared and differing experiences. Its commonly called ethnocentrism. Originating in the field of anthropology, the word is equally used in psychology as a bias for many theories originating in America and the West.

Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.[2] Ethnocentrism may be overt or subtle, and while it is considered a natural proclivity of human psychology, it has developed a generally negative connotation. -wikipedia