Nonverbal communication and culture. Identity, stereotypes and prejudices, страница 20

Think about the assumptions that you might make about others based on their physical appearances. What do you "know" about people if you know they are from the South, Mexico, Australia, or Pakistan? Perhaps it is easier to think about the times that people have made erroneous assumptions about you, based on shallow information – assumptions that you became aware of in the process of communication. Only focusing on someone's nationality, place of origin, education, religion, and so on can lead to mistaken conclusions about the person's identity.

Now let's turn to the static-dynamic dialectic. The problem of erroneous assumptions has increased during the information age, due to our enormous amount of information about the world – the extreme dynamic nature of the world in which we live. We are bombarded daily with information from around the world about places and people. This glut of information and intercultural contacts have heightened the importance of understanding identity in a more complex way.

Given the many identities that we all negotiate for ourselves in our everyday interactions, it is clear how our identities and those of others make intercultural communication problematic. We need to think of those identities as both static and dynamic.

We live in an era of information overload, but we are also furnished with a wide array of communication media that multiply the identities we must negotiate. Consider the relationships that develop by E-mail, for example. Some people even create new identities as a result of online interactions. We change who we are depending on the people we communicate with and the manner of our communication. Yet, we also expect some static characteristics from the people with whom we communicate. We expect others to express certain fixed qualities, which is why we tend to like or dislike them and how we can establish particular communication patterns with them. The tensions that we feel as we change identities from E-mail to telephone to mail to fax and other communication media demonstrate the dynamic and static characters of identities.

Finally, we also have emphasized the personal-contextual dialectic of identity and communication. Although some dimensions of our identities are personal and remain fairly consistent, we cannot overlook the contextual constraints on our identity.

The identity group characteristics described above sometimes form the basis for stereotypes, prejudice and racism. The origins of these lie in both individual and contextual elements.

Stereotypes

Stereotyping represents a problem that is often easier to talk about than to stop it, as it often lies (like culture) below the level of awareness.

Defining stereotypes. Stereotyping is a complex form of categorization that mentally organizes our experiences and guides our behavior toward a particular group of people. W. Lippman in his “Public Opinion” back in 1922 indicated that stereotypes were a means of organizing our images into fixed and simple categories that we use for the entire collection of people. Stereotyping is found in nearly every intercultural situation. The reason for this widely spread nature of stereotypes is the human beings have a psychological need to categorize and classify. The world you confront is too big, too complex, and too transitory for you to know it in all its detail. Hence, you want to classify. Stereotypes, because they tend to be convenient, help you with your classifications.

Developing Stereotypes. How do you acquire stereotypes? You are not born with them. Stereotypes (they may be positive and negative), like culture itself, are learned in a variety of ways:

- first, people learn stereotypes from their parents, relatives, and friends;

- second, stereotypes develop through limited personal contact;

- third, stereotypes can develop from negative experiences;

- finally, many stereotypes are provided by the mass media.