Information overload is a common barrier to effective listening that good speakers can help mitigate by building redundancy into their speeches and providing concrete examples of new information to help audience members interpret and understand the key ideas. Prejudiced communication affects both the people it targets as well as observers in the wider social environment. How we perceive others can be improved by developing better listening and empathetic skills, becoming aware of stereotypes and prejudice, developing self-awareness through self-reflection, and engaging in perception checking. The nerd, jock, evil scientist, dumb blonde, racist sheriff, and selfish businessman need little introduction as they briefly appear in various stories. Stereotypic and prejudiced beliefs sometimes can be obfuscated by humor that appears to target subgroups of a larger outgroup. Add to these examples the stereotypic images presented in advertising and the uneven television coverage of news relevant to specific ethnic or gender groups . Consequently, when the writer allegedly is a Black student, Whites tend to praise a poorly written essay on subjective dimensions (e.g., how interesting or inspiring an essay was) and confine their criticisms to easily defensible objective dimensions (e.g., spelling). Although leakage may not be immediately obvious to many observers, there is evidence that some people pick up on communicators attitudes and beliefs. Within the field of social psychology, the linguistic intergroup bias arguably is the most extensively studied topic in prejudiced communication. Treating individuals according to rigid stereotypic beliefs is detrimental to all aspects of the communication process and can lead to prejudice and discrimination. The one- or two-word label epitomizes economy of expression, and in some respects may be an outgrowth of normative communication processes. Social science research has not yet kept pace with how ordinary citizens with mass communication access are transforming the transmission of prejudiced beliefs and stereotypes. Prejudice Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one's membership in a particular social group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more (Allport, 1954; Brown, 2010). Sometimes different messages are being received simultaneously on multiple devices through various digital sources. Outgroups who are members of historically disadvantaged groups, in particular, are targets of controlling or patronizing speech, biased feedback, and nonverbal behavior that leaks bias. Although this preference includes the abstract characterizations of behaviors observed in the linguistic intergroup bias, it also includes generalizations other than verb transformations. Occupations and roles attributed to members of particular ethnic groups (e.g., grape-stomper, mule) often become derogatory labels. Guadagno, Muscanell, Rice, & Roberts, 2013). Prejudice in intercultural communication. Organizational barriers: In the digital age, people obtain their news from myriad sources. There also is considerable evidence that the linguistic intergroup bias is a special case of the linguistic expectancy bias whereby stereotype-congruent behaviorsirrespective of evaluative connotationare characterized more abstractly than stereotype-incongruent behaviors. If you read and write Arabic or Hebrew, you will proceed from right to left. 400-420). The woman whose hair is so well shellacked with hairspray that it withstands a hurricane, becomes lady shellac hair, and finally just shellac (cf. Communication Directed to Outgroup Members, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.419, Culture, Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination, Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Media Content and Effects, Social Psychological Approaches to Intergroup Communication, Behavioral Indicators of Discrimination in Social Interactions, Harold Innis' Concept of Bias: Its Intellectual Origins and Misused Legacy. Negativity toward outgroup members also might be apparent in facial micro-expressions signals related to frowning: when people are experiencing negative feelings, the brow region furrows . Both these forms of communication are important in ensuring that we are able to put across our message clearly. When prejudice enters into communication, a person cannot claim the innocence of simply loving themselves (simplified ethnocentrism) when they're directly expressing negativity toward another. Exposure to films that especially perpetuate the stereotype can influence judgments made about university applicants (Smith et al., 1999) and also can predict gender-stereotyped behavior in children (Coyne, Linder, Rasmussen, Nelson, & Birkbeck, 2016). . Individuals also convey their prejudiced beliefs when communicating to outgroup members as message recipients. The highly observable attributes of a derogatory group label de-emphasize the specific individuals characteristics, and instead emphasize both that the person is a member of a specific group and, just as importantly, not a member of a group that the communicator values. In this section, we will explore how environmental and physical factors, cognitive and personal factors, prejudices, and bad listening practices present barriers to effective listening. As previously noted, stereotypic information is preferentially transmitted, in part, because it is coherent and implicitly shared; it also is easily understood and accepted, particularly under conditions of cognitive busyness and high unpleasant uncertainty. As the term implies, impression management goals involve efforts to create a particular favorable impression with an audience and, as such, different impression goals may favor the transmission of particular types of information. In peer interactions, for example, Richeson and Shelton have argued that Black and White participants may have different goals (e.g., to be respected versus to appear non-prejudiced); these different goals can prompt unique communication patterns from minority and majority group members. Failures to provide the critical differentiated feedback, warnings, or advice are, in a sense, sins of omission. Group-disparaging humor often relies heavily on cultural knowledge of stereotypes. Stereotypically feminine occupations (e.g., kindergarten teacher) or activities (e.g., sewing) bring to mind a female actor, just as stereotypically masculine occupations (e.g., engineer) or activities (e.g., mountain-climbing) bring to mind a male actor. Following communication maxims (Grice, 1975), receivers expect communicators to tell them only as much information as is relevant. Ethnocentrismassumesour culture or co-culture is superior to or more important than others and evaluates all other cultures against it. Immediacy behaviors are a class of behaviors that potentially foster closeness. Overaccommodation can take the form of secondary baby talk, which includes the use of simplified or cute words as substitutes for the normal lexicon (e.g., tummy instead of stomach; Caporael, 1981). Thus, even when communicators are not explicitly motivated to harm outgroups (or to extol their ingroups superior qualities), they still may be prone to transmit the stereotype-congruent information that potentially bolsters the stereotypic views of others in the social network: They simply may be trying to be coherent, easily understood, and noncontroversial. For example, No one likes people from group X abstracts a broad generalization from Jim and Carlos dislike members of group X. Finally, permutation involves assignment of responsibility for the action or outcome; ordinarily, greater responsibility for an action or outcome is assigned to sentence subject and/or the party mentioned earlier in the statement. Humor attempts take various forms, including jokes, narratives, quips, tweets, visual puns, Internet memes, and cartoons. All three examples illustrate how stereotypic information may be used to ease comprehension: Stereotypic information helps people get the joke or understand the message in a limited amount of time. A member of this group is observed sitting on his front porch on a weekday morning. For example, consider the statements explaining a students test failure: She didnt study, but the test was pretty hard versus The test was pretty hard, but she didnt study. All things being equal, test difficulty is weighted more heavily in the former case than in the latter case: The student receives the benefit of the doubt. In English, we read left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom. For example, faced with an inquiry for directions from someone with an unfamiliar accent, a communicator might provide greater detail than if the inquirers accent seems native to the locale. And concern about appearing prejudiced can lead communicators to overcompensate with effusive praise or disingenuous smiles. Explicit attitudes and beliefs may be expressed through use of group labels, dehumanizing metaphors, or prejudiced humor. 3. 2 9 References E. Jandt, Fred. For example, humor that targets dumb blondes insults stereotypically feminine characteristics such as vanity about physical beauty, lack of basic intelligence, and kittenish sexuality; although such humor perpetuates negative stereotypes about women, its focus on a subgroup masks that broader (not necessarily intentional) message. Generalization reflects a preference for abstract rather than concrete descriptions. Similarly, humor that focuses on minorities from low-income groups essentially targets the stereotypes applied to the wider groups (i.e., middle- or higher-income minorities as well as low-income individuals from majority groups), although on the surface that humor is targeted only to a subgroup. They include displaying smiles (and not displaying frowns), as well as low interpersonal distance, leaning forward toward the other person, gaze, open postures, and nodding. Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one's membership in a particular social group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more (Allport, 1954; Brown, 2010). Communication is also hampered by prejudice, distrust, emotional aggression, or discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, or religion. This page titled 2.3: Barriers to Intercultural Communication is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Lisa Coleman, Thomas King, & William Turner. More abstract still, state verbs (e.g., loathes hard work) reference a specific object such as work, but also infer something about the actors internal states. 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