Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 114

The third step in the perception process is Interpretation. This refers to attaching meaning to sense data and is synonymous with decoding. University of Rochester researchers Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan (2009) showed participants computer images of either urban settings of buildings and roads or natural settings of landscapes and lakes. Participants were asked to study the computer images, note colors and textures, and imagine the sounds and smells associated with the images. The researchers then asked the participants to complete questionnaires about various values, including wealth, fame, connectedness to community, relationships, and the betterment of society. Participants who studied the computer images of natural settings rated close relationships and community values higher than they had after observing the images of urban environments. Participants who studied the computer images of urban settings rated fame and wealth higher. This demonstrates that the same situation can be interpreted quite differently by diverse people. A police officer arriving at a crime scene can be experienced by the victim as calming and relief giving but by a person with an arrest record as fearsome and threatening. Here, too, the effect of culture is great. As you encounter people of your own culture, you constantly make judgments as to age, social status, educational background, and the like. The cues you use to make these decisions are so subtle that it’s often difficult to explain how and why you reach a particular conclusion. Do people in the United States, for example, perceive tall men as more credible? Perhaps. Applying these same cues to someone from another culture may not work. People in the United States, for example, frequently err in guessing the age of Japanese individuals, such as judging a Japanese college student in her mid-20s to be only 14 or 15.