Cross cultural understanding: a handbook to understand others’ cultures

He slaps Erica’s open palm with his palm) 
Erica 
: 
Bad boy! You‘ve been late for 15 minutes in your 
first day! 
Fred 
: 
Terribly sorry for that. I had a very bad jet lag.
Erica 
: oh Fred…meet Chintya…she‘s from Senegal. 
Fred 
:
What‘s happening girl? 
Chintya 
:
 
I‘m visiting your station, Sir. 
EXERCISE 2: 
Discuss a Western movie you’ve watched before and find 
the American values, belief, and norms on it! 
 

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Cross Cultural Understanding | 21 
CHAPTER III 
STEREOTYPE 
 
A stereotype is generalizations of people groups based on 
past experiences, which are deep-rooted in the psyche of the 
people. In another definition, it is said that stereotype is a fixed 
idea or image that many people have a particular type of person, 
thing, or event, but sometimes it is not true in reality. Cultural 
stereotypes mean applying both evidence and our existing beliefs 
about the members of that cultural group.
Stereotypes are called 
idiosyncratic
, if only an individual 
uses them, or they are social, or 
collective
if they are widely shared 
by a group of people. In everyday use, the concept of the 
stereotype is used in various contexts: usually the word stereotype 
is used to refer to members of some kind of collective: firemen 
are courageous, blondes are less intelligent, Italians are noisy, and 
so forth. 
The term stereotype itself, as allegedly used for the first 
time by Walter Lippman in 1922, is used today to mean a readily 
available image of a given social group, usually based on rough, 
often negative generalizations. Although stereotypes can be 
positive as well as negative, they are, in everyday usage, most 
often understood as irrationally based negative attitudes about 
certain social groups and their members. The concept of the 
'stereotype' itself was borrowed from old raised printing 

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22 | Cross Cultural Understanding 
technology, where copies of a composed type were made by using 
papier mache as molds for new printing plates, identical to the 
original, and used to produce the same image over and over 
again.
In intercultural communication, in particular, it is vital to 
distinguish between what is part of a person‘s cultural 
background and what is part of their personality.
In Figure 4.1, Hofstede uses the model of the pyramid to 
illustrate three levels of uniqueness in human mental 
programming. Every person is in some way like other people, 
some, or none.
Figure 3.1: Levels of uniqueness 
Personality 
Culture 
Human nature 

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Cross Cultural Understanding | 23 
We do and think some things because we are humans: for 
instance, we want to sleep, eat, and survive. These are universal 
and inherited characteristics. We also do and think some things 
because of our culture, this might determine. For instance: when 
we eat and sleep, and how far we try to survive. These are 
characteristics which are specific to a particular group of people, 
and are learnt. We also do and think some things because of our 
individual personality. These characteristic are specific to us as 
individuals, and are both inherited and learnt. When trying to 
understand the behavior of a person it is important to consider all 
of these three levels.
Within a culture there will be a range of attitudes, beliefs, 
values, and behavior. It is possible to generalize about culture, but 
care should be taken in applying those generalizations to 
individual. When we meet an individual, we cant tell where they 
are on the range. (see Figure 3.2) 

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24 | Cross Cultural Understanding 
Figure 3.2. How attitudes and belief are distributed 
When a person makes inferences about a new person or 
about some social event, they use their existing knowledge to 
reduce the uncertainty in the situation. The less one knows about 
the object, the more one uses stereotypical generalizations. In an 
intercultural setting, one of the goals of the participant is getting 
to know the attitudes and personality of the communication