Cultural Biases
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跨文化交际Cultural Biases专业马克思主义中国化学号 21131911006 姓名台丽媛ABSTRACTSEthnocentrism, prejudice, discrimination are so familiar and comfortable that overcoming them requires a commitment both to learning about other cultures and to understanding one’s own. Although no one can completely overcome the cultural biases that naturally exist, the requisite knowledge, motivation, and skill can certainly help to minimize the negative effects of prejudice and discrimination.The challenges for inter-culturally competent communicators is to content with the pressing but potentially inflammatory issues of prejudice, discrimination, and racism in a manner that will lead to intercultural contacts that are both appropriate and effective.KEY WORDSEthnocentrism, prejudice, discriminationInteraction only within one’s own culture produces a number of benefits. Because the culture provides predictability , it reduces the threat of the unknown. When something or someone that is unknown or unpredictable enters and respond appropriately, thus reducing the perceived threat of the intrusion. Culture patterns also allow for automatic responses to stimuli; in essence,culture patterns save people time and energy.Intercultural communication, by definition, means that people are interacting with at least one culturally different person. Consequently, the sense of security, comfort, and predictability that characterizes communication with culturally similar people is lost. The greater the degree of intercultural-ness, the greater the loss of predictability and certainty. Assurances about the accuracy of interaction of verbal and nonverbal messaged are lost.Terms that are often used when communicating with culturally different people include unknown, unpredictable, ambiguous, weird, mysterious, unexplained, exotic, unusual, unfamiliar, curious, novel, odd, and strange. As you are read the list, consider how the choice of a particular word might also reflect a particular value. What characteristics, value, and knowledge allow individuals to respond more completely to the threat of dealing with cultural differences? What situations heighten the perception of threat among members of different cultural groups? To answer questions such as these, we need to explore how people make sense of information about others as they categorize or classify others in their social world.I. Social CategorizingThree features in the way all human process in formation about others are important to you understanding of intercultural competence. First, as cognitive psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated, people impose a pattern on theirworld by organizing the stimuli that bombard their senses into conceptual categories. Every waking moment, people are presented with literally hundreds of different perceptual stimuli. Therefore, it becomes necessary to simplify the information by selecting, organizing, and reducing it to less complex form. That is, to comprehend stimuli, people organize them into categories, groupings, and patterns. As a child, you might have completed a drawing by connecting numbered dots. Emerging form was relatively easy to identify. This kind of recognition occurs simply because human beings have a tendency to organize perceptual cues to impose meaning usually by using familiar, previous experiences.Second, most people tend to think that other people perceive, evaluate, and reason about the world in the same way that they do. In other words, humans assume that other people with whom they interact are like themselves. Indeed, it is quite common for people to draw their personal experiences to understand and evaluate the motivation of others. This common human tendency is sometimes called “ethnocentrism”.Third, humans simplify the processing and organizing of information from the environment by identifying certain characteristics as belonging to certain categories of persons and events. For example, a child’s experiences with several dogs that growled and snapped are likely to result in a feature reaction to other dogs as if they will also growl and snap. The characteristics of particular events, persons, or objects, once experienced, are often assumed to be typical of similarevents, persons, or objects. Thought these assumptions are sometimes arrogant, often they are not. Not all dogs necessarily growl and snap at your children. Nevertheless, information processing results in a simplification of the world, so that prior experiences are used as basis for determining both the categories and the attributes of the events. This process is called “stereotyping”.Please note that we are describing these human tendencies nonevaluatively . Their obvious advantage is that they allow people to respond efficiently to a variety of perceptual stimuli. Nevertheless, this organization and simplification can create some genuine obstacles to intercultural competence because they may lead to prejudice, discrimination, and racism.II. EthnocentrismAll cultures teach their members the “preferred”ways to respond to the world, which are labeled as “natural” or “appropriate”. Thus, people generally perceived their own cultural forces, as natural, human, and universal. This belief that the customs and ethnocentrism.Cultures also train their members to use the categories of their own cultural experiences when judging the experiences of people from other cultures. Our culture calls us that the way we taught to behave is “right” or “correct”, and those who do things differently are wrong. William G.Sumner, who first introduced the concept of ethnocentrism, define it as “the view of things in which one’s owngroup is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it ”.Ethnocentrism is a learned belief in cultural superiority. Because cultures teach people what the world is “really like”and what is “good”, people consequently believe that the values of their culture are natural and correct. Thus, people from other cultures who do things differently are wrong. When combined with the natural human tendency to prefer what is typically experienced, ethnocentrism produces emotional reactions to cultural differences that reduce people’s willingness to understand disparate cultural messages.Ethnocentrism tends to highlight and exaggerate cultural differences. As an interesting instance of ethnocentrism, consider beliefs about body odor. Most U.S. Americans spend large sums of money each year to rid themselves of natural body odor. They then replace their natural odor with artificial ones, as they apply deodorants, bath powders, shaving lotions, perfumes, hair sprays, shampoos, mousse, gels, toothpaste, mouthwash, and breath mints.Another example of ethnocentrism concerns the way in which cultures teach people to discharge mucus from the nose. Many U.S. Americans purchase boxes of tissues and strategically place them at various points in their home, office, and cars so that they will be available for use when blowing their nose. In countries where paper products have historically been scare and very expensive, people blow their noses onto the ground or the street. Pay attention to your reaction as youread this last statement. Most U.S. Americans when learning about this behavior, react with a certain amount of disgust. But think about the U.S. Practice of blowing one’s nose into a tissue or handkerchief, which is then placed on the desk or into a pocket. Now ask yourself which is really more disgusting--carry around tissues with dried mucus in them or blowing the mucus onto the street? Described in this way, both practices have a certain element of repugnance,but because one’s culture teaches that there is one preferred way, the custom is familiar and comfortable and the practices of other cultures are seen as wrong or distasteful.Ethnocentrism can occur along with the dimensions of cultural patterns. People from individualistic cultures, for instance. Find the idea that a person’s self concept is tied to a group to be unfathomable. To most U.S. Americans, the idea of an arranged marriage seems at best and a confining and reprehensible limitation on personal freedom at worst.To be a competent intercultural communicator, you must realize that you typically use the categories of your own culture to judge and interpret the behavior of those who are culturally different from you . You must also be aware of your own emotional reactions to the sights, sounds, smells and variations in message systems that you encounter when communicator dose not necessarily suppress negative feelings,but acknowledges their existence and seek to minimize their effect on her or his communication. If you are reacting strongly to some aspect of another culture, seek out an explanation in the ethnocentric preferences that yourculture has taught you.Ⅲ. PrejudicePrejudice refers to negative attitudes toward other people that are based on fault and inflexible stereotypes. Prejudiced attitudes includes irrational feelingsof dislike and even hared for certain groups,based perceptions and beliefs about the group members that are not based on direct experiences and first-hand knowledge, and a readiness to behave in negative and unjust ways toward members of the group . Gordon Allport,who first focused scholarly attention on prejudice, argued that prejudiced people ignore evidence that is inconsistent with their based viewpoint, or they distort the evidence to fit their prejudice.The strong link between prejudice and stereotypes should be obvious. Prejudiced thinking is dependent on stereotypes and is a fairly normal phenomenon. To be prejudiced toward a group of people sometimes make it easily to respond to them. We are not condoning prejudice or the hostile and violent action that may occur as a result of prejudice. We are suggesting that prejudice to ward others and for societies to avoid basing social structures on their prejudices about groups of people, it is critical to recognize the prevalence of prejudicial thinking.What functions does prejudice serve? We have already suggested that the thought process underlying prejudice includes the need to organize and simplify the world, Richard Brislin describes four additional benefits, or what he callsfunctions, of prejudice. First, he suggests that prejudice satisfies a utilitarian or adjustment of function. Displaying certain kinds of prejudice mean that people receive rewards and avoid punishments. For example, if you express prejudicial statements about certain people, other people may like you more. It is also easier to simple dislike and be prejudiced toward members of other groups because they can then be dismissed without going through the effort necessary to adjust to them. Another function that prejudice serves is an ego-defensive one; it protectsself-esteem. For example, people who are unsuccessful in business may be prejudiced toward groups whose members are successful. Still another advantage of prejudicial attitudes is the value-expressive function. If people believe that their group are certain qualities that are unique, valuable, good., or in some way special, their prejudicial attitudes toward others is a way of expressing those values. Finally, Brislin describes the knowledge function as prejudicial attitudes that people hold because of their need to have the world neatly organized and boxed into categories. This function takes the normal proclivity to organize the world to an extreme. This function takes the normal human proclivity to organize the world to an extreme. The rigid application of categories and the prejudicial attitudes assigned to certain behaviors and beliefs provide security and prejudicial attitudes assigned to certain behaviors and beliefs provide security and increase prejudice. Nor are people usually aware of the specific reasons for their prejudices. For each person, prejudicial attitudes may serve several functions.IV. Overcoming cultural biasesEthnocentrism, prejudice, discrimination are so familiar and comfortable that overcoming them requires a commitment both to learning about other cultures and to understanding one’s own. A willingness to explore various cultural experiences without prejudgment is necessary. An ability to behave appropriately and effectively with culturally different others, without invoking prejudiced and stereotyped assumption, is required. Although no one can completely overcome the cultural biases that naturally exist, the requisite knowledge, motivation, and skill can certainly help to minimize the negative effects of prejudice and discrimination.Because “prejudice” is such emotionally charge concepts, it is sometimes very difficult to comment on their occurrence in our interactions with others. Individuals who believe that they have perceived discriminatory remarks and actions sometimes feel that they cannot risk the resentment of their coworkers, fellow students, teachers, or service providers that would likely occur should they demand interactions that do not display prejudiced against them. Conversely, those who do not regard themselves as having prejudiced or racist attitude and who believe they did not behave in a discriminatory way may be horrified to learn that others might interpret their attitudes as prejudiced and their actions as discriminatory . While discussions about ethnocentrism, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and racism can lead to a better understanding of the interpersonaldynamics that arise as individuals seek to establish mutually respectful relationships, they can just as easily lead to greater divisions and hostilities among people. The challenges for inter-culturally competent communicators is to content with the pressing but potentially inflammatory issues of prejudice, discrimination, and racism in a manner that will lead to intercultural contacts that are both appropriate and effective.Reference1、Gao Yihong, “Developing Intercultural Communication Competence: Going Across and Going Beyond ” in Proceedings of The 2000 International Symposium on Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching,University of Northern Iowa,20022、Edward T.Hall, the Silent Language, Anchor Books Doubleday, New York, 1981.3、Rogers, E.M.and Steinfatt, T.M.,Intercultural communication, the Bobbs-merill educational publishing, 1981.4、Davis, L.Doing Culture: Cross一Cultural Communication in Action[M] Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001:187一217.5、Samova LA et munication between Cultures[Ml,Beijing:Thomson Learning Asia. &Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000:66一74-6、Triandis, H. 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