DISCRIMINATION AND PREJUDICE
When biases are acted upon, the actor is showing discrimination and prejudice. Discrimination is the act of sifting out and selecting according to bias toward something or someone. We say someone has "discriminating taste" as a compliment because that person is able to sift carefully through a mass of items and identify the best. To be undiscriminating is to lack judgment and to be unable to discern the best from the second-best or the inferior. In the United States discrimination became a widely used term for racism. People identified other people as better or worse than the rest based solely upon their perceived racial membership, and the term discriminate against began to be used. This changed the meaning: "to discriminate" with "against" came to mean "to sift through and select out the unacceptable." Prejudice is an evaluative opinion that is based on emotion or some other irrational basis, but not on facts. It may be held in spite of the facts. A prejudice is usually negative, and because it is not grounded in fact, it can be called an irrational bias. Prejudice is often accompanied by or based upon suspicion, fear, hate, or contempt. Just as business communicators need to be aware of stereotype and bias, we also need to be aware of prejudices and consciously avoid acting upon them. Racism is one form of prejudice. Sexism is another. Ageism is prejudice in favor of younger rather than older individuals. Homophobia is the term usually used to mean prejudice against homosexuals, although the word really means a phobia or irrational fear of same-sex eroticism. Prejudices can affect intercultural business. Not only are they often unrecognized by the people that have them, but also, in foreign surroundings, people's prejudices can come to the forefront. People who would not allow themselves to express prejudice in their own culture may nevertheless do so in an unfamiliar culture. This is a well-documented expression of culture shock, as discussed earlier. An interesting experiment was conducted to identify the presence of prejudice. E.S. Bogardus asked people to rate on a scale from 1 to 8 how favorably they felt toward groups of people according to their national identity. The most favorable, number 1, indicated a willingness to have a daughter or son marry someone of that group; an 8 meant not being willing to allow someone of that group into the country, let alone into one's home. The interesting thing was that the list of more than 60 nations—Italians, Czechs, Moroccans, Nigerians, Thais, and Turks, for example—included three fictitious ones: Danireans, Pireneans, and Wallonians. Bogardus found that the people who were more unwilling to admit members of other nations into close relationships were unwilling to admit the unknown nations' members also. And conversely, tolerance toward many nations included tolerance toward the three unknown and nonexistent nations. This finding implies that intolerant people are intolerant across the board, while tolerant people are tolerant even of unknown nationalities. 2. Answer the questions based on the text: - What is “Ethnocentrism” and how does it interfere with effective communication? - How does the author define “projected cognitive similarity”? - Do you agree with the statement: “In order to understand the other person you have to understand yourself”? - What business attire is considered appropriate in different countries? - What is cultural stereotype? How do stereotypes emerge? - How can the term “prejudgments” be defined in the context of intercultural communication? - Can you think of some example of bias? - What is discrimination? - What forms of prejudices do you know? - What is E.S. Bogardus experiment about? What are the results of the experiment?
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