15.3 How To Use Stereotypes

Your first reaction to that phrase might well be “Don’t!” — as in: “You shouldn’t use stereotypes at all; they’re bad, they’re discriminatory, they’re nothing but trouble!” If you watch old movies, one of the most cringeworthy aspects is the reliance on stereotypes, and thank goodness some enlightened filmmakers in recent years are trying to reduce racism by steering clear of stereotypes. In your own life, you may have put a lot of effort into trying not to make assumptions about anyone, especially people in different demographic categories from your own, and instead just look at them as people.

That’s an admirable effort, but it runs into a few roadblocks.

• Human beings are pattern-seekers, continually trying to form generalizations to help make sense of the world. This is especially true when you are in a foreign country: your mind can’t help but start working on figuring out “What are people like here?” If you are visiting Finland and try to strike up a conversation with a stranger on a bus but they just stare blankly at you, you can conclude “I guess my luck was bad: I found a person who doesn’t like chatting with strangers.” If you turn to the next person and get a similar reaction, it doesn’t take long before you conclude that Finns aren’t fond of small talk. Continuing to search for conversational partners on that bus doesn’t seem wise: learn your lesson and adapt.
• Assuming others are just like you is naive, and you can easily sound like Milo saying “deep down inside, we’re all cats, right?” One reason foreigners are sometimes perceived as rude is because they treat the country they are visiting just like their own, and assume that the people are the same as the people “back home.” The assumption that everyone else is just like you is a feature of ethnocentrism, the tendency to see the world from your own culture’s perspective, and it is the cause of much intercultural friction.
• Life without assumptions is extremely inefficient. Taken to the extreme, the avoidance of stereotypes can look like someone starting from “square one” [LINK TO BOX 2.1, CHAPTER 2] with every single person they encounter, building up an accurate perception of the person one step at a time: Does a smile mean they are happy? Do they understand what a question is? Do they know how to read a clock? Do they love their children? Approaching every new person like Louise Banks approaches the heptapods in Arrival would slow life down to a dead crawl.

Stereotypes, in other words, serve a function: they allow us to make predictions, to interpret other people’s behavior, and to figure out how we should act in certain environments. This book is full of models of communication, and they perform the same functions. I’ll repeat a thought from the preface of this book [LINK TO PREFACE]: that communication models try to “neatly encapsulate phenomena that are messy, complex, inconsistent, unpredictable and baffling” … which is a pretty good description of what travelers have to do to survive. But that phrase appears right after an expression coined by statistician George E.P. Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

The real lesson is not to avoid assumptions entirely — which is like trying to get parts of your brain with no “off switch” to shut down — but to use those stereotypes or models productively, without clinging to them too tightly. Stereotypes are a “first best guess” about how and why people behave. What is most important is to recognize that it is only a guess, and abandon that guess in the face of contradictory evidence. The chapter on logic and reasoning includes a list of logical fallacies [LINK TO 7.D], one of which is called “Whole for the Part”: the assumption that what is true for a greater entity (such as “the values and habits of Brazilians”) is true for every part of that entity (i.e., the Brazilian person you are speaking to right now).

Indrei Ratiu did a fascinating study of intercultural skill,^[1] based on a survey on 250 attendees of international schools for business managers, asking them which managers are the “most international.” After identifying the top 10 percent of managers who thrived in international environments, Ratiu sought to understand what made them different, and the answer was surprising: they did not rate very highly on factors you might consider vital to intercultural competence — patience, flexibility, broad-mindedness, or empathy — but they did stand out in their attitude toward stereotypes. They all used cultural stereotypes to some degree, but “the so-called ‘most international’ use them self-consciously and tentatively, as if recognizing the stereotype as no more than a temporary hold on an elusive reality” (p. 142). One of the internationally savvy managers described himself as “forever testing” and watching closely for reactions (p. 143). This is in contrast to other managers who used stereotypes conclusively, assuming they were valid and stable and not in need of constant re-examination. The dangers of confirmation bias are ever present: once you think you understand how people from a particular culture work, you start ignoring counterexamples and alternate interpretations.

It brings to mind the popular 1992 book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, by John Gray, a book that reinforces gender stereotypes that are not supported by empirical research.^[2] Whenever I hear people talk about gender in simple categorical terms, like Gray does, I ask “Do you know any man who isn’t Mars-like? Any woman who isn’t Venus-like?” (Personally, I know many Venus-like men and Mars-like women.) Likewise, when someone describes Japanese people as being collectivistic, I think “except for the Japanese people who aren’t.” It’s okay to have a starting assumption, as long as you are willing to leave it behind and do the work of trying to figure out this particular person you are talking to right now.

Before we move on discussing particular features of culture, let me offer three cautions:

1. Historically, one of the most common ways to talk about cultural differences was by country, i.e., “this is what Malaysians are like,” “this is what Bolivians value.” One issue with this approach is that cultures don’t line up with international borders very neatly: there can be wide cultural variations within one country, and commonalities that cross borders.^[3] From a distance, cultures may look uniform, but from the inside it’s obvious to the members of a region how much variation there is. Say to a resident of the U.S. “You Americans are all alike,” and you’re likely to get an earful about how different New Yorkers are from Texans, or even how little New York City residents identify with rural residents of upstate New York.
2. Even if you can describe the dominant culture of a region accurately,^[4] that doesn’t cover co-cultures that also exist within that region (sometimes called countercultures or subcultures, although those terms imply that the “dominant culture” is inherently better). For example, inside many modern cities that are kept in a state of order by formal government structures, you can also find homeless encampments that operate under their own self-created governments.^[5] Rather than use the government-issued forms of money that are accepted in stores and businesses, for example, people in those encampments use the barter system or create their own form of currency.
3. A single dimension can never adequately describe a human being. It’s vital to remember the concept of intersectionality: the idea that any person’s patterns and behaviors are shaped not just by where they are from, but also by their race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, disability status, family of origin, and life experiences. For example, accents are often discussed in terms of geographic regions, but the way a person pronounces words can also be influenced by their socioeconomic class, their sexual orientation, and their education. This is why talking about an “English accent” is simplistic: a person with a Cockney accent (associated with low education, working class status, and a particular district in London) doesn’t sound much like King Charles III, even though their homes are only a few miles apart.

With those precautions in mind, we can look at some of the dimensions that scholars have identified to help understand differences in how people communicate and behave. The most well-known researcher in the field of cultural dimensions is Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede, and if you have 32 minutes, it’s worth hearing him talk about this work. The value of a dimensional model is not in painting a particular culture with a broad brush, but in helping people understand how people may think differently than you do, and learning to be on the lookout for the stumbling blocks that lead to miscommunication. What are the differences that make a difference? The more you learn about those differences, the easier it is to see things in a new light and find tools to achieve mutual understanding.