Читать книгу Going Abroad 2014 - Waldemar A. Pfoertsch - Страница 12

Interpretation happens when an individual gives meaning to observations and their relationships; it is the process of making sense out of perceptions. Interpretation organizes your experience to guide your behavior. Your experience helps you to make assumptions about the things you see so you will not have to rediscover meanings each time you encounter similar situations. For example, you make assumptions about how doors work, based on your experience of entering and leaving rooms; that is why you do not have to relearn each time how and that you have to open a door. Consistent patterns of interpretation like the one mentioned help you to act appropriately and quickly every single day.

Since there are more stimuli coming down on you than you can keep distinct, you only perceive those images that may be meaningful. As said before, you group perceived images into familiar categories that help you to simplify your environment and become the basis for your interpretations. For example, when a driver approaches an intersection, he or she might not see what is happening on the sidewalk, but will definitely notice whether the traffic light is red or green (selective perception). If the light is red, he or she automatically places it in the category of all red traffic signs (categorization) and will stop like prior times (behavior based on interpretation).

Categorization helps you to distinguish what is important in your environment and to behave accordingly; it becomes ineffective when we place people and things in the wrong group. Cross-cultural miss-categorization happens when someone uses his home country categories to make sense of foreign situations. For example, a Korean businessman entered a client’s office in Stockholm and encountered a woman behind the desk. Assuming that she was a secretary, he announced that he wanted to see Mr. Silferbrand. The woman responded by saying that the secretary would be happy to help him. The Korean became confused. In assuming that most women are secretaries rather than managers, he had misinterpreted the situation and acted inappropriately. His category makes sense because most women in Korean offices are secretaries but it proved counterproductive since this particular Swedish woman was not a secretary.

Stereotyping involves a form of categorization that organizes your experience and guides your behavior toward ethnic and national groups. Stereotypes never describe individual behavior; rather they describe the behavioral norm for members of a particular group. For example the stereotype of German businessmen is to be very punctual, busy and ambitious. Stereotypes, like other forms of categories, can be helpful or harmful depending on how one uses them. Effective stereotyping allows people to understand and act appropriately in new situations. But you should always keep in mind that stereotypes describe a group norm and not the characteristics of a specific individual, that they only describe a group and do not evaluate it and that you can and should modify them, based on further observation and experience with the present people and situations.

The problem with stereotyping is that it often leads to prejudice, a pre-judging of people you actually do not even know. In contrast to stereotypes, prejudices are based on emotions and easily translate into feelings of uneasiness and fear.

Even more dangerous than stereotyping and prejudice, certain groups of people feel that they are superior to others. In this state, others are seen as having positions below one’s own and that gives rise to making judgments about what is right and wrong according to one’s own values. This is called ethnocentrism. This attitude inevitably leads to conflicts with people from other countries, as they will probably think the same about their own culture.