of one intercultural participant is motivated by differences such as skin color, sexual
orientation, religious affiliation, or cultural heritage. But in this age, when what
happens in one place reverberates throughout the world, retreat and withdrawal
can have devastating effects. As the philosopher Flewelling wrote,“Neither prov-
ince, parish, nor nation, neighborhood, family, nor individual, can live profitably
in exclusion from the rest of the world.”When confronted with a challenging inter-
cultural communication situation, we urge you to be mindful, seek some type of
commonality with the other person, and do not let uncertainty push you into with-
drawing from the contact.Stereotyping
Stereotyping is a natural, often subconscious way of dealing with unknown situations.
When confronted with unfamiliar circumstances, you normally draw on previously
acquired knowledge to analyze, evaluate, and classify the new situation. While stereo-
typing may be a normal cognitive process when meeting strangers, problems can arise
when negative stereotypes are assigned.Stereotyping Defined
Stereotyping is a complex form of categorization that mentally organizes your
experiences with and guides your behavior toward a particular group of people. It
is a means of cognitively organizing your perceptions into simplified categories that
can be used to represent an entire collection of things, processes, or people. A more
formal definition can be found in the psychology literature:“A stereotype is a cog-
nitive structure containing the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies
about some human social groups.”^16 Stereotyping is a pervasive human activity due
to the need for cognitive structure. The world is too big, too complex, and too
dynamic to comprehend everything in detail. To help make sense of your physical
and social environment, you tend to filter, classify, and categorize in order to reduce
uncertainty. Although this is a natural and necessary process, problems arise when
you tend to overgeneralize.
Stereotypes can assume either a positive or a negative form. The generalization
that people with PhD degrees in astrophysics from MIT are good at mathematics is a
positive generalization and probably pretty accurate. However, this characterization is
referring to a quite small number of individuals who represent a specialized context.
The assumption that all Asian students are hardworking, well mannered, and intelli-
gent is an example of a positive stereotype that represents an overgeneralization of a
large group of people. Classifying all people who dress in Goth fashion as drug addicts
is a negative stereotype. In both examples, a group of people is ascribed common
characteristics that not everyone in the group possesses. You know that not all
Asian students are hardworking and intelligent and that not everyone who wears
Goth clothes does drugs. Each group, Asians and Goth dressers, is composed of indi-
viduals who may or may not exhibit the ascribed stereotypical characteristics. Because
stereotypes tend to narrow your perceptions and can easily take a negative tone, they
often result in erroneous, overgeneralized categorizations of a group of people. This
overgeneralization, especially when negative, can adversely impact intercultural
communication.Stereotyping 389Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).