Marked nouns such as lady engineer or Black dentist signal that the pairing is non-normative: It implies, for example, that Black people usually are not dentists and that most dentists have an ethnicity other than Black (Pratto, Korchmaros, & Hegarty, 2007). The communicator makes assumptions about the receivers knowledge, competence, and motivation; those assumptions guide the message construction, and may be revised as needed. Because observers are less likely to notice the absence of something (e.g., short meetings, nominal advice) than the presence of something (e.g., unkind words or derogatory labels), these sins of omissions can be overlooked as prejudiced communication. When feedback-givers are concerned about accountability without fear of appearing prejudiced, they provide collaboratively worded suggestions that focus on features that significantly could improve performance. Chung, L. (2019). Discuss examples of stereotypes you have read about or seen in media. An examination of traditional morning and evening news programs or daily newspapers gives some insight into how prejudiced or stereotypic beliefs might be transmitted across large numbers of individuals. Favoritism may include increased provision of desirable resources and more positive evaluation of behaviors and personal qualities, as well as protection from unpleasant outcomes. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. Casual observation of team sporting events illustrates the range of behaviors that reflect intergroup bias: Individuals don the colors of their teams and chant their teams praises, take umbrage at a referees call of egregious penalties against the home team, or pick fights with rival fans. There is a strong pressure to preferentially transmit stereotype-congruent information rather than stereotype-incongruent information in order to maximize coherence. sometimes just enough to be consciously perceived (e.g., Vanman, Paul, Ito, & Miller, 1997). Although the dehumanizing metaphor may include a label (as discussed in the earlier section), the metaphor goes beyond a mere label: Labeling a group as parasites also implies that they perpetuate moral or physical disease, evince swarming behavior by living in unpredictable bands of individuals, and are not true contributing members of society (i.e., parasites live off a host society). Similarly, video clips of arrests are more likely to show police using physical restraint when the alleged perpetrator is Black rather than White. Future research needs to be attentive to how historically advantaged group members communicate from a position of low power, as well as to unique features in how historically disadvantaged group members communicate from a position of high power. Racialdiscriminationisdiscriminationagainst an individual based solely on membership in aspecificracial group. In intercultural communication, assume differences in communication style will exist that you may be unaware of. What people say, what they do not say, and their communication style can betray stereotypic beliefs and bias. In Samovar, L.A., &Porter,R.E. Ethnocentrism shows up in large and small ways. On the recipient end, members of historically powerful groups may bristle at feedback from individuals whose groups historically had lower status. Finally, most abstract are adjectives (e.g., lazy) that do not reference a specific behavior or object, but infer the actors internal disposition. Ng and Bradac (1993) describe four such devices: truncation, generalization, nominalization, and permutation: These devices are not mutually exclusive, so some statements may blend strategies. This type of prejudice is a barrier to effective listening, because when we prejudge a person based on his or her identity or ideas, we usually stop listening in an active and/or ethical way. Broadly speaking, people generally favor members of their ingroup over members of outgroups. The contexts discussedhumor, news, entertaining filmcomprise some notable examples of how prejudiced communication is infused into daily life. Bias: Preconceptions or prejudice can lead to stereotyping or false assumptions. As research begins to consider interactions in which historically lower status group members hold higher situational status (cf. In many settings, the non-normative signal could be seen as an effort to reinforce the norm and imply that the tagged individual does not truly belong. Prejudiced and stereotypic beliefs can be leaked through linguistic choices that favor ingroup members over outgroup members, low immediacy behaviors, and use of stereotypic images in news, television, and film. Using Semin and Fiedlers (1988) Linguistic Category Model, there are four forms of linguistic characterization that range in their abstractness. These features include shorter sentences, slower speech rate, and more commonly used words than might be used with native speakers. An example of prejudice is having a negative attitude toward people who are not born in the United States and disliking them because of their status as "foreigners.". Similarly, transmitting stereotype-congruent information helps develop closeness among newly acquainted individuals (Ruscher, Cralley, & OFarrell, 2005). It refers to a primary negative perception created by individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, cast or language. Stereotypically feminine occupations (e.g., kindergarten teacher) or activities (e.g., sewing) bring to mind a female actor, just as stereotypically masculine occupations (e.g., engineer) or activities (e.g., mountain-climbing) bring to mind a male actor. In The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport wrote of nouns that cut slices. He argued that human beings categorize who and what they encounter and advance one feature to a primary status that outweighs and organizes other features. This can make the interaction awkward or can lead us to avoid opportunities for intercultural communication. The level of prejudice varies depending on the student's home country (Spencer-Rodgers & McGovern, 2002). Most research on intergroup feedback considers majority group members (or members of historically powerful groups) in the higher status role. Still, its crucial to try to recognize ourown stereotypic thinking. Although this preference includes the abstract characterizations of behaviors observed in the linguistic intergroup bias, it also includes generalizations other than verb transformations. And when we are distracted or under time pressure, these tendencies become even more powerful (Stangor & Duan, 1991). Prejudiced communication takes myriad forms and emerges in numerous contexts. Similarly, Blacks are more accurate than Whites in detecting racial bias from Whites nonverbal behavior (Richeson & Shelton, 2005). Prejudice Oscar Wilde said, "Listening is a very dangerous thing. In some settings, however, a communicator may be asserting that members of the tagged group successfully have permeated a group that previously did not include them. The link was not copied. It is important to avoid interpreting another individual's behavior through your own cultural lens. Superiority or disparagement theories essentially posit that receivers may be amused by the relative inferiority of the outgroup; conceivably, such theories are especially relevant when communicators hope to manage impressions of their own superiority or to boost ingroup members egos. Those who assume a person from another cultural background is just like them will often misread or misinterpret and perhaps even be offended by any intercultural encounter. Physical barriers to non-verbal communication. With the advent of the Internet, social media mechanisms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook allow ordinary citizens to communicate on the mass scale (e.g., Hsueh, Yogeeswaran, & Malinen, 2015). Andersen, P. A., Nonverbal Communication: Forms and Functions (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999), 57-58. The research on cross-race feedback by Kent Harber and his colleagues (e.g., Harber et al., 2012) provides some insight into how and why this feedback pattern might occur. Presumably, Whites are concerned about being prejudiced in cross-race feedback settings. If you read and write Arabic or Hebrew, you will proceed from right to left. Stereotypes are oversimplifiedideas about groups of people. Individuals in low-status positions are expected to smile (and evince other signs of deference and politeness), and smiling among low-status individuals is not indicative of how they actually feel. Indeed, animal metaphors such as ape, rat, and dog consistently are associated with low socioeconomic groups across world cultures (Loughnan, Haslam, Sutton, & Spencer, 2014). People may express their attitudes and beliefs through casual conversation, electronic media, or mass communication outletsand evidence suggests that those messages impact receivers attitudes and beliefs. Organizational barriers: When we listen, understand, and respect each others ideas, we can then find a solution in which both of us are winners.". Stereotypes are frequently expressed on TV, in movies, chat rooms and blogs, and in conversations with friends and family. Crossing boundaries: Cross-cultural communication. But, of course, all things are not equal when intergroup biases may be operating. Dramatic examples of propaganda posters are on display in the United States National World War II Museum (e.g., one that uses the parasite metaphor depicts a beautiful Japanese woman combing lice-like allied soldiers out of her hair). Furthermore, the categories are arranged such that the responses to be answered with the left and right buttons either fit with (match) thestereotype or do not fit with (mismatch) thestereotype. Small conversing groups of ordinary citizens who engage in ingroup talk may transmit stereotypes among themselves, and stereotypes also may be transmitted via mass communication vehicles such as major news outlets and the professional film industry. It is unclear how well the patterns discussed above apply when women or ethnic minorities give feedback to men or ethnic majority group members, though one intuits that fear of appearing prejudiced is not a primary concern. The widespread use of certain metaphors for disparaged outgroups suggests the possibility of universality across time and culture. Treating individuals according to rigid stereotypic beliefs is detrimental to all aspects of the communication process and can lead to prejudice and discrimination. Communication Directed to Outgroup Members, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.419, Culture, Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination, Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Media Content and Effects, Social Psychological Approaches to Intergroup Communication, Behavioral Indicators of Discrimination in Social Interactions, Harold Innis' Concept of Bias: Its Intellectual Origins and Misused Legacy. But ethnocentrism can lead to disdain or dislike for other cultures and could cause misunderstanding and conflict. Failures to provide the critical differentiated feedback, warnings, or advice are, in a sense, sins of omission. It is generally held that some facial expressions, such as smiles and frowns, are universal across cultures. What is transmitted is very likely to be stereotypic, brief, and incomplete . They arise because of the refusal to change or a lack of motivation. Some individuals express disgust at other cultureseating meat from a dog or guinea pig, for example, while they dont question their own habit of eating cows or pigs. They may be positive, such as all Asian students are good at math,but are most often negative, such as all overweight people are lazy. . For example, the metaphors can be transmitted quite effectively through visual arts such as propaganda posters and film. Listeners may presume that particular occupations or activities are performed by members of particular groups, unless communicators provide some cue to the contrary. ), Cross-cultural psychology: Contemporary themes and perspectives (pp. Stereotype-incongruent characteristics and behaviors, to contrast, muddy the picture and therefore often are left out of communications. Possessing a good sense of humor is a highly valued social quality, and people feel validated when their attempts at humor evoke laughter or social media validations (e.g., likes, retweets; cf. Guadagno, Muscanell, Rice, & Roberts, 2013). Ordinary citizens now have a historically unprecedented level of access to vehicles of mass communication. Nominalization transforms verbs into nouns, again obfuscating who is responsible for the action (e.g., A rape occurred, or There will be penalties). But not all smiles and frowns are created equally. Analyze barriers to effective interculturalcommunication. But other motivations that insidiously favor the transmission of biased beliefs come into play. Third-person pronouns, by contrast, are associated with distancing and negative feelings (e.g., Olekalns, Brett, & Donohue, 2010). In their ABC model, Tipler and Ruscher (2014) propose that eight basic linguistic metaphors for groups are formed from the combinations of whether the dehumanized group possesses (or does not possess) higher-order affective states, behavioral capacity, and cognitive abilities. It bears mention that sighted communicators sometimes speak loudly to visually impaired receivers (which serves no obvious communicative function). Some contexts for cross-group communication are explicitly asymmetrical with respect to status and power: teacher-student, mentor-mentee, supervisor-employee, doctor-patient, interviewer-interviewee. 27. Stereotypes and Prejudice as Barriers 28. The most well-known implicit measure of prejudicetheImplicit Association Test (IAT)is frequently used to assess stereotypes and prejudice (Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007). Immediacy behaviors are a class of behaviors that potentially foster closeness. Reliance on shared stereotypicand even archetypicalimages essentially meets the communication goals discussed earlier: A story must be coherent, relevant, and transmitted in a finite amount of time. Accessibility StatementFor more information contact us atinfo@libretexts.orgor check out our status page at https://status.libretexts.org. Prejudice is thus a negative or unfair opinion formed about someone before you have met that person and is not based on any interaction or experience with that person. As such, the observation that people smile more at ingroups and frown more at outgroups is not a terribly insightful truism. Again, depending on the situation, communicators may quickly mask their initial brow furrow with an obligatory smile. Brief, cold, and nonresponsive interactions often are experienced negatively, even in the absence of explicitly prejudiced language such as derogatory labels or articulation of stereotypic beliefs. Thus, just because a message may use subtle linguistic features or is not fully intentional, bias still may impact observers just as more explicitly biased communications do. An attorney describing a defendant to a jury, an admissions committee arguing against an applicant, and marketing teams trying to sell products with 30-second television advertisements all need to communicate clear, internally consistent, and concise messages. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. In many such cases, the higher status person has the responsibility of evaluating the performance of the lower status person. Empirical work shows that such prejudiced attitudes and stereotypic beliefs can spread within ingroup communities through one-on-one conversation as well as more broadly through vehicles such as news, the entertainment industry, and social media. Learning how to listen, listening more than you speak, and asking clarifying questions all contribute to a better understanding of what is being communicated. This topic has been studied most extensively with respect to gender-biased language. In fact, preference for disparaging humor is especially strong among individuals who adhere to hierarchy-endorsing myths that dismiss such humor as harmless (Hodson, Rush, & MacInnis, 2010). Prejudice, suspicion, and emotional aggressiveness often affect communication. Define and give examples of stereotyping. Explain when this happened and how it made you feel. Ruscher and colleagues (Ruscher, Wallace, Walker, & Bell, 2010) proposed that cross-group feedback can be viewed in a two-dimension space created by how much feedback-givers are concerned about appearing prejudiced and how much accountability feedback-givers feel for providing feedback that is potentially helpful. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Individuals also convey their prejudiced beliefs when communicating to outgroup members as message recipients. For example, female members of British Parliament may be photographed in stereotypically feminine contexts (e.g., sitting on a comfortable sofa sipping tea; Ross & Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1997). . Where did you start reading on this page? We also acknowledge previous National Science Foundation support under grant numbers 1246120, 1525057, and 1413739. Prejudice Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one's membership in a particular social group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more (Allport, 1954; Brown, 2010). The intended humor may focus on a groups purported forgetfulness, lack of intelligence, sexual promiscuity, self-serving actions, or even inordinate politeness. The LibreTexts libraries arePowered by NICE CXone Expertand are supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlot. People also direct prejudiced communication to outgroups: They talk down to others, give vacuous feedback and advice, and nonverbally leak disdain or anxiety. Intercultural Conflict Management. People also may obtain their news from social media mechanisms such as Facebook and Twitter, or from pundits and comedians. More abstract still, state verbs (e.g., loathes hard work) reference a specific object such as work, but also infer something about the actors internal states. All three examples illustrate how stereotypic information may be used to ease comprehension: Stereotypic information helps people get the joke or understand the message in a limited amount of time. Humor attempts take various forms, including jokes, narratives, quips, tweets, visual puns, Internet memes, and cartoons. The term 'prejudice' is almost always used in a negative way to describe the behavior of somebody who has pre-judged others unfairly, but pre-judging others is not necessarily always a bad thing. Hall, E. T. (1976). In K. D. Keith (Ed. When prejudice leads to incorrect conclusions about other people, it can breakdown intercultural communication and lead to feelings of hostility and resentment. Examples include filtering, selective perception, information overload, emotional disconnects, lack of source familiarity or credibility, workplace gossip, semantics, gender differences, differences in meaning between Sender and Receiver, and biased language. Consequently, when the writer allegedly is a Black student, Whites tend to praise a poorly written essay on subjective dimensions (e.g., how interesting or inspiring an essay was) and confine their criticisms to easily defensible objective dimensions (e.g., spelling). Although little empirical research has examined the communication addressed to historically disadvantaged outgroups who hold high status roles, these negative evaluations hint that some bias might leak along verbal and/or nonverbal channels. Although the persons one-word name is a unique designation, the one-word label has the added discriminatory value of highlighting intergroup differences. Like the work on exclusion discussed earlier, such interactions imply that outgroup members are not worthy of attention nor should they be accorded the privileges of valued group members. The highly observable attributes of a derogatory group label de-emphasize the specific individuals characteristics, and instead emphasize both that the person is a member of a specific group and, just as importantly, not a member of a group that the communicator values. Group-disparaging humor often relies heavily on cultural knowledge of stereotypes. Prejudice is thus a negative or unfair opinion formed about someone before you have met that person and is not based on any interaction or experience with that person. Beyond Culture. Activities: Experiencing Intercultural Barriers Through Media, Ruiz, Neil, Khadidijah Edwards, and Mark Lopez. Language Conveys Bias Step 1: Describe the behavior or situation without evaluating or judging it. Neither is right or wrong, simply different. Stereotype-congruent features also are preferred because their transmission maintains ingroup harmony in existing groups (Clark & Kashima, 2007). (Nick Ross). As previously noted, stereotypic information is preferentially transmitted, in part, because it is coherent and implicitly shared; it also is easily understood and accepted, particularly under conditions of cognitive busyness and high unpleasant uncertainty. 2. There is some evidence that, at least in group settings, higher status others withhold appropriate praise from lower status outgroup members. Even if you don't outwardly display prejudice, you may still hold deeply rooted prejudicial beliefs that govern your actions and attitudes. Most notably, communicators may feel pressured to transmit a coherent message. 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