World view
A worldview is fundamentally the way individuals perceive and interpret the world around them. It acts as a lens through which knowledge, experiences, values, and beliefs are filtered, resulting in unique perspectives shaped by one's home environment, culture, and personal experiences. Worldviews encompass ideas about reality, morality, and logic, including one's beliefs regarding religion and political ideologies. The term "weltanschauung," a German expression for "world perception," highlights the deep connection between language and worldview, as introduced by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Worldviews are not static; they evolve over time and can be influenced by the dominant cultural perspectives within society. For instance, historical examples illustrate how significant shifts in understanding, such as the acceptance of heliocentrism, challenge and reshape prevailing worldviews. In contemporary society, the rapid exchange of information through the internet can both reinforce and challenge existing worldviews, leading to phenomena like confirmation bias, where individuals favor information that aligns with their beliefs.
However, the rise of fictitious news and misinformation complicates this landscape, as some individuals and organizations exploit existing worldviews for financial gain. This underscores the importance of critical engagement with information, as worldviews can significantly affect decision-making and societal dynamics. Understanding the concept of worldview can provide valuable insights into human behavior, communication, and the complexities of cultural interactions.
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Subject Terms
World view
Worldview simply refers to the way in which one perceives the world and its inhabitants. It is the lens through which knowledge is filtered. A worldview is shaped by people's home environment, experiences, education, and the culture of their hometown and country. A worldview includes values and morals, and what one believes is favorable or unfavorable. A worldview encompasses perceptions about what is real and what is fictitious. It also defines one's logic and reasoning, such as what the result of an action might be. Of course, worldview cannot be separated from religious beliefs (or lack thereof) and political ideology. A worldview is one's perspective of one's place in the world in relation to others. It can be summed up as one's perception of reality.
Because no one has had exactly the same experiences or knowledge as another, each person's worldview is unique. The wealthy, well-educated child from a broken home will have a very different perspective from the impoverished child with a happy family, even if the two live in the same town. An African American, Christian lawyer might have a very different worldview from a secular White woman who raises cattle.
Background
Worldview is sometimes referred to as weltanschauung. It is a German word that means "world perception." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher, popularized the term. He believed knowledge was gained when people's worldviews conflicted with the dominant worldview of their culture.
A dominant worldview is one that pervades a society, or one that is accepted by the majority of a population. One need only look at the literature of the past to see how dominant worldviews have changed over time. Long ago, it was the dominant worldview that the earth was flat. As people acquired knowledge, that dominant worldview changed. People no longer fear sailing off the edge of the earth.
Now that society has the Internet, knowledge can be gained at a much quicker pace than ever before. People type their thoughts and views into status boxes on social media. The fast exchange of information provides people with easily accessible knowledge that can shape and change their existing worldviews, and better understand the worldviews of others who are part of other societies and cultures. This is an unprecedented phenomenon, as people's worldviews influence every decision they make.
Overview
Even though modern society has access to troves of information, people's worldviews dictate how they interpret all that they learn. That knowledge is filtered through the lens of their own experience. People's perceptions sometimes lead them to manipulate facts in a way that suits their worldview; this is called confirmation bias. People tend to give information more credence if it fits their ideals, and avoid or devalue that which does not. This leads to people insulating themselves to prevent their beliefs from being challenged.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian professor of mathematics. He subscribed to the Copernican theory, which is the belief that the planets revolve around the sun, a theory that today has proven to be true. However, Galilei's thoughts were at odds with the church's dominant worldview at the time. Galilei was sentenced to house arrest and books supporting heliocentrism (the belief that Earth and the other planets revolve around a stationary sun) were banned. Science and religion play a large role in shaping people's worldviews. These two forces are often at odds.
Throughout history, people were often punished for challenging the dominant worldview, whether or not said people were correct. The desire to be right trumps the quest for knowledge, and in days past, nothing good would come from defying the dominant worldview, however wrong it was. Heretics are those who oppose the dominant worldview, and many religions have punished heretics by such acts as stoning, hanging, and burning.
Of course, this behavior is not only limited to religion and religious institutions. People who helped slaves flee the Antebellum South faced swift and violent punishment, such as hanging. These abolitionists acted on their own beliefs, and those beliefs conflicted with the dominant culture of their society.
Even in modern times, people still prefer information that validates their worldview. Some people have decided to exploit this desire for financial gain. There are now various websites containing fictitious news articles that reinforce people's worldviews. These are stories that are not skewed or biased by being filtered through the lens of worldview, but are wholly untrue. The idea behind these sites is to publish what people want to hear, and to report stories that fit in well with conspiracy theories that frame how people view the world and its happenings. Some entrepreneurs who run these fictitious news sites make a great deal of money, some reporting earning between $10,000 to $30,000 a month. These sites make their revenue through ads. Each time someone clicks an ad on a website, the website's owner makes several cents. If a site is accessed by many people and stories on that site are frequently shared on social media, the advertisers and the site owner benefit financially. Articles from these fictional news sites are often shared many times. For instance, in the fall of 2016, a story was published about actor Tom Hanks endorsing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Hanks had actually supported Trump's opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. This fake news article was shared more than one hundred thousand times on Facebook, generating a great deal of income for the website on which it originated. The spread of fake news continued to remain a problem throughout the early twenty-first century.
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