National Stereotypes: Do They Hinder or Contribute to Cross-cultural Communication?

“Stereotypes are commonly believed ideas about members of certain groups, based merely on membership in that particular group. They are often mentioned in a adverse or prejudicial sense and are often made use of to justify particular discriminatory behaviors. More benignly, they are likely to imply sometimes-accurate folk wisdom about social reality.”

The majority of us will agree that stereotyping is not really the most useful methodology for understanding a social group to which one does not belong.

Does that necessarily demonstrate that all stereotypes are mean or inaccurate, however? Everybody would say that there is nothing good or positive in stereotyping, but recent social theory has gone away from that stereotypical view. Although stereotypes do commonly have negative implications, they are not necessarily negative. Stereotypes are basically generalizations made about some groups of people. Such generalizations are necessary: in order to have an efficient  communication, we must have some idea of what we, people, are going to be like, which behaviours will be considered acceptable, and which not.

The most important problem associated with stereotyping is that it cannot be applied to every single person. Stereotypes allow us to assign people to some category, according to the group they belong to, and make inferences about how they will behave based on that grouping. Still there will be differences between people from one culture, and with the same individuals in different situations. In contrast, the stereotype is reasonably accurate, so it is useful. Stereotypes are only a problem when they are inaccurate, especially when these inaccuracies are negative and virulent.

There is another negative influence of relying on stereotypes. Most people have a tendency to ignore some important aspects of personality that do not correspond with the stereotype itself. From my point of view stereotyping is a narrow minded way of jumping to conclusions. Our international community must contradict negative stereotypes in direct interactions between individuals, in the media, public service advertising and through education.

More often people definitely are much more reasonable than their stereotypes would suggest. In that case, getting to know people personally helps to destroy adverse images. This is especially true when individuals determine that they in fact have things in common with people from the other side. Those things can range from enjoying the same style of music, activities,  interests or sports, to having the same worries and fears about children or aging parents.

My articles:

>> Survey: 76% of Employees Know Their Colleagues’ Salary

>> Traditional Russian borsch