Imposed Etic Bias

"Etic" and "emic" are perspective concepts that are taken from field research in the fields of anthropology and other social and behavioral sciences. The etic approach to research is viewing and evaluating the culture from outside where the emic approach is a cultural view made from the inside of a culture. An "imposed" etic bias occurs when an observer attempts to generalize observations from one culture to another.

For instance, a researcher studies a jungle-dwelling Amazon tribe and comes to conclusions regarding the tribe's social organization, history, traditions, etc. It would be an imposed "etic" bias for this researcher to then try to apply what he had learned from the Amazon tribe to an African tribe just because they both live in jungle environments.

See Emic and Etic definitions.