1. the practice of regarding one’s own ethnic, racial, or social group as the center of all things. Just as egocentrism is a sense of self-superiority, so ethnocentrism is the parallel tendency to judge one’s group as superior to other groups.

2. the tendency, often unintentional, to base perceptions and understandings of other groups or cultures on one’s own. Also called ethnocentricity. See also ingroup bias; racism; sociocentrism. —ethnocentric adj. [first described by U.S. sociologist William G. Sumner (1840–1910)]