Who are "they"?
"They have no respect for rule of law."
"They pollute their country."
"They love stirring up trouble."
This is a tiny sampling of things I've heard Americans say about Chinese. Goodness knows I've said my share of nasty things over the years.
Humans are really good at making overly general statements about groups. I've discussed this in many other posts on this blog. It's a core issue in social psychology. There's nothing new here.
What I'd like to do in this post is provide a perspective you may not have heard, and to offer a new way of looking at things.
Americans love the individual. We know that stereotyping is "wrong" and we feel we shouldn't do it. So an instinctive way for an American to react to statements like the above is to say something like, "You have to treat individuals as individuals. You can't go making generalizations."
Here's the thing, though: we have to be able to make general statements about groups of people. Groups of people differ. This is obvious.
Where's the middle ground? Something called a "cultural generalization" — a concept which comes from the field of intercultural communication. A cultural generalization is just what it sounds like: a general statement made about a group of people based on their culture. A cultural generalization is different from a stereotype in two key ways. First, the intention is to understand, not to insult. And second, it uses cautious language rather than absolute language.Think of stereotypes at one end of a continuum, and cultural generalizations at the other. Consider this progression:
Americans don't care about the elderly.
Many Americans don't seem to care about the elderly.
From what I've observed, many Americans don't seem to care about the elderly.
From what I've observed, many Americans don't seem to care about the elderly as much as they care about their own material possessions.
Each step involves the addition of some language to transform the naked stereotype in #1 into the nuanced cultural generalization in #4:
#2 dulls the extremity of the statement, making it clear that we aren't talking about every member of the category, and that we're talking about appearances, not necessarily reality.
#3 adds subjectivity: this is about my own impressions, not about objective fact.
#4 adds a comparison, making the statement even less absolute.
We end up with a statement, #4, that is much less threatening than #1, and has the added benefit of being more factually accurate. It captures the essence of what the speaker is sensing about a group, but does so without condemning the entire group.
It might seem like "just semantics" — some kind of linguistic trickery. I don't see it that way. I think that doing this exercise over and over again creates a kind of discipline in our thinking, and over time can help transform our thought habits in ways that will help us understand "the other" better, and to work more effectively with people from groups different from our own.
One way of thinking about this, which also comes from the field of intercultural communication, is "seeking complexity in the other." We don't normally do that. Normally we make snap judgments about a whole group. It's our inheritance as humans. "The other," by default, is a monolith. It's worth the effort to see how "they" are just as complex as "we" are — and not just in the trite sense that "we're all unique individuals." While it's true that we're all unique, "they" and "we" are different, but "their" system has a logic and a coherence that is just as logical and coherent as "our" system.