MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS

One way of understanding our own culture, as well as another, is to use mental categories to represent groups. These are often called "stereo­types." These mental representations are not necessarily bad. In fact, they can be very use­ful tools. But some distinction is necessary between stereotype and prototype.

The term stereotype comes from printing, when type set in one frame identically repro­duced that type in another frame: stereo type. The limitation of stereotypes, however, as illustrated by the historical origin of pieces of type set in a frame for printing, is that they are fixed and rigid. We use the term prototype to mean mental representations based on general characteristics that are not fixed and rigid, but rather are open to new definitions. When confronted with something unfamiliar or complex, people categorize data in order to make sense out of it. If you know nothing about the market for frozen french fries, for example, but you suddenly have an urgent need to know, you begin with organizing the topic into categories: producers, their market shares, commercial users (by size, by type), retail market segments, prices, potato suppliers, and so forth. The same categorizing occurs when you encounter a new culture. If we couldn't make generalizations and put similar items into categories, we couldn't make any sense of an unfamiliar subject.

Mental representations change with the induction of new experience. They are dynamic and can be altered to form new mental categories as more data comes in. Everyone has a large data bank of mental representations. In order to understand yourself you need to be aware of your own data bank and its categories. Then when you encounter an actual cul­ture, you can understand how your mental prototype is being transformed by reality. You can be open to new awareness and have a dynamic experience of the transformation of your mental categories.

Even incomplete, sketchy prototypes based on objective observation usually have some truth in them. That's why they can be useful. "Latin American businesspeople talk about their families, often before getting down to business"; "Japanese negotiators use silence a lot more than Europeans."

Generalizations that express an evaluation of members of a culture are prejudices— pre­judgments: "Chinese always give you a fish-eye look; they don't feel any emotion"; "Irish have hot tempers and get angry easily; they can be really difficult to deal with." In other words, it's when we begin drawing evaluative conclusions from the mental representations that we may be in trouble. It may be one's experience that Chinese do not readily show emotion, but that doesn't equal coldness, which is an evaluation. It is judging Chinese character, not simply observing behavior. It may be one's experience that Irish easily find words to express emotion. But hot-tempered is a judgment one assigns based on one's cul­ture. Prejudice, or prejudging before all the facts are known, is leaping to an evaluative conclusion without gathering information about the culture and the context.

BIAS

Everyone has biases and many are readily acknowledged. You may have a bias towards tough disciplinary measures for dealing with those who break the rules, or a bias toward a work environment where the superior is approachable and low-key, or a bias toward a four-day work week. A bias for something is really nothing more than preference. Many biases are recalled from long-term memory only when forced by an external challenge.

For example, in studies done of job interviews, results show interviewers are biased toward interviewees who appear to come from their same cultural background—who have an accent that indicates membership in the same ethnic group, for example. When other factors remain constant, the accent is the factor that determines which candidate gets the job from which interviewer.¹⁴ In this case the bias has an easily understandable basis; we prefer what is known and familiar because it poses little threat.

We need to be aware of our biases. We need to be open to the discovery within of unrec­ognized biases that can exert an influence on how we understand another culture.