Worldviews

Understanding Worldviews

In 1978, noted educator and psychologist Derald Wing Sue stated that a worldview is the way in which individuals perceive their connection to nature, institutions, and other individuals. He stated that worldviews are influenced by an individual’s cultural upbringing and life experiences. One’s worldview is composed of an individual’s psychological orientation to life and can dictate an individual’s thinking, behavior, decision making, and understanding of events. In 2016, Farah Ibrahim and Jianna Heuer defined worldview as an individual’s assumptions, beliefs, and core values stemming from their primary culture and inclusive of the socialization process experienced through development from infancy to adulthood. One’s worldview is employed in everyday life to make decisions and solve problems. As a construct, worldview appears to be stable over time; however, when an individual experiences a significant life event (e.g., near-death experience, traumatic events, life transitions), changes can and do take place. Within a society or culture, one can observe variability in worldviews, and within societies, dominant and alternative worldviews exist. In counseling, the construct of worldview allows a counselor to understand how their clients make sense of their worlds, people, and other cultures. More importantly, worldviews, when applied intentionally by a counselor with the desire to understand their client, can minimize cultural malpractice (i.e., the possibility of oppressing or having the counselor impose their values and assumptions on the client).

Theoretical Underpinnings of Worldviews

The evolving conceptualization of worldview is driven by two primary perspectives: cultural anthropology and philosophy. Traditional understandings of worldview were grounded in cultural anthropology, which focused on five existential categories, each of which can be further divided into three possible outcomes: human nature/character (bad, good and bad, good); mode of human activity (being, being in, becoming); social relationships (hierarchical, mutual, individualistic); relationship between humans and nature (harmony, subjugation and control, nature’s power); and the temporal nature to human existence (past, present, future). Based on these perspectives, counselors can conceptualize different dimensions of worldview alignments, where the beliefs and values from each dimension are influenced by the individual’s cultural context. From the philosophical perspective, worldview is structured on philosophical constructs, including the nature of the universe (cosmology), the theory of knowledge (epistemology), the nature of being (ontology), the study of value (axiology), and the theory of finality as a function of something (teleology). The philosophical perspective of worldview is used to understand the construct of self and consciousness for different ethnic groups.

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