Stereotype And Intercultural Communication

In traditional research on stereotype, the focus has been on negative stereotypes and stereotypes' negative values, and researchers generally have approached the issue from a social psychological viewpoint which sees stereotype as a static factor in social perception. The present thesis, taking a dialectical and descriptive approach, intends to explore the issue from a broader sense and place stereotypes into the dynamics of intercultural communication.The author, after surveying a host of previous definitions, puts forward an integrated definition of stereotype in neutral terms: stereotype represents cultural ideological statement; it is a belief (or a set of beliefs) about people in a social category. In order for people to gain a panoramic vision of stereotype and to pave the way for the present study, a good body of chapter 1 is devoted to an examination of stereotype formation, development, and application from a social psychological perspective. Then, Schramm's model of communication and the attribution theory are introduced as the theoretical basis of this thesis. After that, the author designs a "qualitative study which adopts two questionnaires as the major instrument and follow-up interviews as back-up. In the study, Chinese English majors and the Americans are chosen as the two groups to represent the two parties in intercultural communication, and the questionnaires are to investigate the content of the American stereotypes (held by Chinese English majors) and their general effects on communication between Chinese students of English and the Americans.Data are collected from the two questionnaires and necessary further information is obtained from follow-up interviews. Findings show that stereotypes, together with values, serve as the basis of communication expectation and the attribution of meaning to communication behavior; that positive stereotypes can promote communication; that stereotypes can lead to perceptual inaccuracies, prejudice, and discrimination; and that an awareness of such impact may help inhibit stereotypes.