Colonial mentality

Internalized inferiority. Automatically preferring what is foreign, especially American, and automatically discounting what is Filipino, including yourself. The everyday shape of it is a comparison that feels like it was run and was not: the result arrives first, and the reasons assemble behind it.

The important word in the definition is automatically. In the research it is not treated as an opinion a person holds and could be talked out of, but as a learned association that activates faster than deliberate judgment. That is why it survives arguments, including the ones people have with themselves.

Source: E. J. R. David and Sumie Okazaki (2006), “The Colonial Mentality Scale (CMS) for Filipino Americans: Scale construction and psychological implications,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(2), 241 to 252, which built the first psychometric measure of the construct, and David and Okazaki (2010), “Activation and automaticity of colonial mentality,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(4), 850 to 887, which argued from an Implicit Association Test that the preference operates below conscious control. Both are paid; the ERIC abstract of the 2006 paper is free at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ735949 . The measurement work was done on Filipino Americans rather than on Filipinos living in the Philippines, and that limit travels with the term everywhere this course uses it.

First used in: 2.5 · The reflex underneath the opinion