One of the most common barriers to being a culturally responsive emotion scientists is that we often see others emotions as a reflection of our own emotions. We are biased by what we have felt and experienced, and we make judgments based on this biases. We think, "I felt frustrated when that happens, so that person must feel frustrated too. Or when I act that way, it's because I'm feeling overwhelmed, so she must be feeling overwhelmed as well." Assumptions in any arena can be harmful, but it can be especially problematic when we assume we understand the emotions of people from backgrounds, races, and cultures that are different from our own. As we learned previously, behavior does not equal emotion. Without asking someone how they feel, there's a lot of room for a misperception. Research shows we are less accurate in reading emotions of people who look different from us than in people who are similar to us. Being an emotion scientists means pausing and acknowledging our limitations, and often narrow views in questioning our assumptions about the way someone is feeling. "Do I know for certain that this child is feeling angry? How do I know? What else might they be feeling?" Another common bias is ethnocentrism. The fancy term for ROA is the right way. We often evaluate the behavior of people with cultural backgrounds different from our own, based on our own cultures, standards, and customs. In fact, research shows that we automatically, unconsciously tend to favor people who are similar to us in ethnicity, but also in age, religion, and political affiliation. Interestingly, studies have even shown that people show strong preferences towards others who share their birthday, or a sports jersey of a team they like, or even suddenly resembled themselves especially if they're resemblance relates to their own race or ethnicity. This bias may lead us to believe that our way, what we have learned, our customs to seeing and doing is the right way and the better way. It's these beliefs that have contributed to structural and systemic racism and prejudices to groups of people with different abilities, ages, religious and political affiliations, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Other biases relate to how we explain our own and others behavior. One such bias is the fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency for people to over attribute someone's behavior to that person's personality or characteristic rather than particular circumstances but do the opposite for themselves. For instance, when we assume someone expresses emotions a certain way, because that is a function of that person's race, age, gender identity, or some other variable. But when we express our own feelings at certain way, we attribute it to the situation and not our personality or character. The most common example of this phenomenon is people seeing something bad happens to someone else. But 65 percent of the time, observers blame the person's behavior or personality for the unfortunate incident. Fortunately, more and more research is showing that we can combat both our biases and our related behavior with a few simple methods. Doing the personal work to enhance your skill and perceiving emotions, learning more about others cultures, and getting to know others well, especially those who have different backgrounds than us.
