Cultural stereotypes

Cultural stereotypes

The concept of the 'stereotype' was borrowed from old raised printing technology, where copies of a composed type were made by using papier mache as molds for new printing plates, identical to the original. The term stereotype, as allegedly used for the first time by Walter Lippman in 1922, is used today to mean a readily available image of a given social group, usually based on rough, often negative generalizations. Although stereotypes can be positive as well as negative, they are, in everyday usage, most often understood as irrationally based negative attitudes about certain social groups and their members. Stereotypes are called idiosyncratic, if only an individual uses them, or they are social, or collective if they are widely shared by a group of people.

In everyday use, the concept of the stereotype is used in various contexts: usually the word stereotype is used to refer to members of some kind of collective: firemen are courageous, blondes are less intelligent, Italians are noisy, and so forth. When a person makes inferences about a new person or about some social event, they use their existing knowledge to reduce the uncertainty in the situation. The less one knows about the object, the more one uses stereotypical generalizations.

In an intercultural setting, one of the goals of the participant is getting to know the attitudes and personality of the communication partner. In this process, we apply both evidence and our existing beliefs about the members of that cultural group. These are cultural stereotypes. Stereotypes can concern one's own group or that of the other. These are called respectively auto- and hetero-stereotypes. Nonetheless, members of a given group may also share common conceptions about the other party's stereotypical assumptions about themselves, or about the respective 'other' party. Due to the fact that the person, in this case, is projecting their own prejudices onto the group of others, this type of stereotyping could be called a projected stereotype.

The different national or cultural stereotypical assumptions can be described as follows: Simple auto-stereotype: In our opinion we [my nationality] are . . . Projected auto-stereotype: We think that they [inhabitants of the foreign country] consider us to be . . . Projected hetero-stereotype: We feel that they [the inhabitant of the foreign country] think that they are . . . Simple hetero-stereotype: We think that they are . . .

For instance, a Finn may feel that 'the Finns' are hard-working/diligent and honest, but at the same time they think that 'the Swedes' consider 'the Finns' to be drunks, backward and simple, and that 'the Swedes' consider themselves to be more educated and 'better people', whereas for 'the Finn', they are boastful and cold!

Often, stereotypes are understood to be detrimental to intercultural communication and the elimination of stereotypes was believed to be a prerequisite for any successful intercultural exchange. This idea could be read, in amongst other places, in the preface to the book, Stereotyping and prejudice, by Bar-Tal et al. (1989: 1), where they state;

The study of stereotyping and prejudice reflects an interest in intergroup relationship(check the quote, as, grammatically, this should read relationships). While we recognize that a discussion of intergroup relationship may focus on behaviours describing actions such as confrontations, violence, wars, cooperation, alliance, negotiation, or coordination, we also believe that each of these intergroup behaviours is mediated by perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. (I have made this change as the quotation ran over more than two lines and, therefore, required separating from the main body of the text.

However, eliminating stereotypes is not possible, or, if it were done, it would be detrimental to human cognition. Stereotypes, as such, are cognitive schemata, typical of the human cognitive system, which assigns a set of characteristics to all members of a given social group, and serves as a reference when assigning significance to observations and experiences in social interactions. They are mental structures, which simplify the complex stimuli from one's environment and facilitate their comprehension.

When we walk on the street, for instance, just to get to a certain address, we may not be able to tell how many