Our own cultural knowledge is the starting point for our perception of otherness. Human perception is a process by which we use our sensory organs to experience, structure, and evaluate the world around us, in other words by which we make what we sense into a meaningful experience. This insight is particularly important in the case of the intercultural encounter, when things new and alien to us have to be sensed, selected, categorised, and interpreted. In this sense learning how to manage and control one’s own perception is an important building block for intercultural competence.

Deceptive reality

Our consciousness leads us to believe that we perceive reality »as it is«. In normal everyday life we believe that our senses portray reality 1:1. But in fact our feeling deceives us. A comparison with the animal world shows how limited our perception is: thus bats or whales are capable of finding their way by echo sounding, bees or snakes register light frequencies of which we notice nothing and dogs distinguish smells completely unknown to us. Human experience of perception reflects just a small extract of the physical world.

Our limited ways of perception are the basis on which we construct our human world. Things which we experience and describe as »loud«, »quiet«, as »green« or »red«, as »sweet-smelling« or »bad-smelling« are just extracts of comprehensible reality. Our perceptions are ultimately mere constructions of our minds which are by no means identical with our environment but constructions which nonetheless provide a helpful orientation in our surroundings and so secure our survival.

For an adequate understanding of our perception a model from the philosophical school of constructivism is of some help in which two levels of reality are distinguished: on the one hand there is a physical, objective reality of the first order, which can be measured with scientific methods, and on the other there is a reality of the second order which is based on the attribution of sense and value to things and which plays the greater role in everyday life and communication.

Perception is an active process

Illustration 1

Look at the following drawing.

What do you see here?

Most people think that this drawing shows four squares and four circles. Look more closely! You will conclude that your perception does not actually square with reality.

Your brain is playing a trick on you here. You are seeing things that don't exist at all because your perceptive impression is influenced by the so-called »gestalt laws«. You have probably grouped the figures together on account of their similarity and their spatial proximity and interpreted the lines and the arcs as »squares« and »circles« on account of the quality of their shapes. Then finally you perceived the objects viewed as more complete and harmonious than they actually are. The following illustration shows how very powerful these laws are:

Illustration 2

Do you see the circles?

Of course inherent laws of this type enable you to come to terms with your environment successfully. But at the same time they can manifestly give rise to imprecise perception.

Caution is advised here: All stimuli which affect the perceptive organs are not simply registered passively and are certainly not free of value judgements. They are rather processed by your brain in the course of a complex procedure. To put it another way: perception is a highly active process which sometimes makes it impossible for us to register impressions true to reality. The objective reality of the world around us remains closed to us.

Sense making and categorising

The human being has to lend meaningto things, to make sense ofthem, to place them within a context and define their purpose. Only then can he find his way around. The process of sense making in the context of perception is steered to a considerable extent by the fact that each person in the course of his life learns schemes of perception or categories which he applies to his surroundings, thus lending them sense and order. For instance at birth no one has an idea of what a chair is. Adults can recognise one without any difficulty on account of the fact that people have learned in the course of growing up which characteristics distinguish the chair as an object.

In the course of our lives these categorisations develop in different directions. Variations of meaning for the objects of perception come into being, as do assorted »realities of the second order« for each person. One and the same stimulus can sometimes be interpreted in very different ways. While one person loves jazz music, for example, another may think it horrible, while some like the smell of a perfume, others think it an offensive odour.

Illustration 3

What meaning do you attach to the following drawing? Do you see an Eskimo or a native American?

Perception is selective

When the human senses register incoming stimuli, the brain does not absorb the information completely or indiscriminately. It filters the stimuli through a comparison with stored categories in which known data are recognised and ultimately integrated into a comprehensive perception, If an object approximates to the scheme (sit has four wooden legs and a wooden board on top of theme), it is recognised as »chair. Perception is thus a selective process which makes it easy for humans to categorise things successfully.

However the perceptive system encounters problems as soon as it is confronted with the unknown. Selective attention dictates that we can only pay attention to one piece of our environment at a time. And because of selective retention we can only retain some of the stimuli we perceive. Most of them are perceived, processed, and then forgotten.

Categorising means the arrangement of the – selectively - perceived stimuli into patterns. We then try to make sense of the patterns by assigning meanings to them — and if a pattern turns out to be unknown or unfamiliar, then we don't »recognize« the perceived. Or in other words: our perception makes us see what we already know.

Illustration 4

What do you think these two photographs show? 

The above picture shows a mosque, the lower one the burial ground of a local Islamic saint. Both photos were taken in the Algerian desert.

In the process of perception the bias of the »filtering mechanisms« gains a special importance: as pointed out above, the human being tends to ward off, reinterpret or even not recognise stimuli which do not match his expectations. Conversely he is inclined to prefer stimuli which do match his expectations. In particular one must reckon with the fact that one's way of selecting and processing information is influenced by numerous factors, such as:

a) Natural needs

As has been proved, hunger and thirst can change the perceived appearance of food.

b) Attitudes, interests, values

In a bookshop a passionate chess player notices first and foremost the chess books. Our perception is also affected by the values we attach to objects: in an experiment test participants had to guess the size of coins and of card-board discs of the same size. The coins were thought to be bigger because they had a declared value.

c) Personal contact and emotional meaning

Specifically emotional closeness leads to all kinds of perceptive distortion. We excuse bad behaviour in a loved one more than when we are dealing with an unknown person (»Love makes you blind«).

Perception is culturally specific

Perception is not only an individual phenomenon but is also dependent on the respective life environment - it is culturally specific. Cultural comparisons reveal numerous differences in perception.

One reason for these differences could be that particular environmental conditions influence our sensory functions. The quality of the hearing sense among the Bushmen of the Kalahari decreases less with increasing age than among US Americans — simply because they are subjected to a lower level of noise. Particular life circumstances can play a part, too: in Cuba there has been an increased incidence of eye diseases over the last few decades because of inadequate vitamin levels.

Perception in intercultural contexts

Most irregularities in the perception of intercultural situations are related to cultural differences: one and the same act can be »seen« by assorted participants completely differently. For instance laughing out loud when someone falls down on the street can be perceived as »laughing at someone« or as »distracting someone from the pain«. Such differences in perception are caused by the fact that we grow into different cultural contexts. The culturally specific socialisation of a human being determines a sort of conditioning by means of particular forms and dispositions in perception.

Thus some cultures differ as regards their perception of smell. A comparative international study from 1999 showed that German and Japanese test persons perceive smells very differently. It was considerably easier for both groups to recognise, categorise, and describe smells from their own life environment. Distinct differences regarding aversions and preferences for particular smells also became apparent - especially with regard to food vapours.

A further example of different habits of perception is illustrated by the sequence of pictures that follows. A US American baby food producer carried out an advertising campaign in the USA showing three pictures of a baby. In one picture the baby seemed very dissatisfied, in a further one it drank a company product and on a third it was beaming happily at the observer.

Illustration 5

The campaign ran very successfully in the USA which is why the decision was taken to use the same advertising in Arab countries. The company’s management was forced to conclude, however, that the product sold really badly there. The reason: Arabic is written and read from right to left. Arab consumers were perceiving picture sequences in the same order as the normal reading direction.

The topic of perception in intercultural comparison becomes more complex when one considers that all perceptive stimuli refer to culturally specific symbolic contents, regardless of whether it's things, situations or people. For intercultural communication in practice what this means is that when you encounter the culturally unfamiliar you must reckon with a symbolic meaning attached to an object completely contradicting your own. Moreover, each individual thing can have a number of meanings.

Items of food can serve as an example. They inherently bear a variety of meanings of which a cultural stranger often has only limited awareness. While they can be eaten and thus serve primarily to meet a physiological need, they fulfil many other functions above and beyond this. If an item of food is handed over as a gift, this can signal friendly intent to a guest or even a future bond. Social status can also be expressed via food, for example in the form of an expensive invitation. As a »national dish« an item of food can also express ethnic or territorial identity.

Attribution processes

The influence of culture on perception is often reflected in the attribution process. Attribution denotes our attempts to explain strangers’s behaviours. In the process of perception and interpretation we always make attributions in order to explain social events and actions and to place them within a comprehensible context. This is the only way we can gain orientation in our social environment, e.g. adopt sensible ways of behaviourfor ourselves and predictfuture behaviours of others. Pinpointingthe (correct) explanation for behaving in this or that way in intercultural interaction is therefore of prime importance.

Causal explanations or attributions can in principle be of two types: person-based or situation-based. That is, either we look for reasons in a person's own qualities (e.g. character, physical and psychological characteristics) or in the current constellation of the situation itself. If for instance you as a teacher ask yourself why a student got a bad grade in his exam, you can explain this, say, with »laziness« (an assumed personal quality) or because you presume that on the day of the exam he was distracted by external circumstances (justification through the situation).

The causal explanations in one's own cultural context develop as a result of unconscious routines. In Germany one rarely asks for an explanation for extending the right arm and hand when meeting. One »knows« without asking why the hand is stretched out, why we smile at introduction or say our family name in greeting. It is one's own culture that provides attributions for these ways of behaving.

But if we communicate with strangers who have learnt other cultural values, ideas of norms, rules of communication etc., i.e., who know other forms of »normality«, then we are frequently made to face the fact that they don’t conduct themselves as we expected. Their behaviour often appears to us to be »unusual«, e.g. when our partner laughs when we would »normally« expect him to react seriously, or when throughout a conversation he unexpectedly seems annoyed or remains silent although we expect him to answer directly and quickly.

Illustration 6

Attribution errors

It may appear that the attribution process takes a long time, but in reality we go through this analysis very quickly. This doesn't mean, though, that it is easy to make accurate and appropriate attributions. Particularly in intercultural interactions it is difficult to interpret the behaviour of others correctly and to make so-called »isomorphic« attributions, i.e., attributions which mirror the viewpoint of our communication partner. Errors in attribution occur when we ascribe the strangers’ behaviours to reasons different than those originally intended. These might be sometimes harmless, but sometimes they can give grounds for critical misunderstandings. This can be demonstrated by the following episode:

In 1991 in a quarter of Washington DC with a large number of Hispanic residents young male Hispanics often sat in front of their houses and drank beer, a habit they knew from their home countries. This behaviour was perceived by other residents and the police as undesirable and even as illegal »loitering«, also because in DC the public consumption of alcohol was not allowed. A female police officer decided to do something about this and asked the young men to take their beers inside. But since they considered their behaviour completely normal, they protested and refused to meet the officer's demand. During this encounter they moved up to her very closely, again a common behaviour in their home countries. But the police officer interpreted this physical proximity as a threat, drew her weapon and fired a shot in the air. The situation escalated rapidity and it ended in civil war-like riots.

When looking for causal explanations for behaviours we are always inclined to make value judgements. There are several biases that affect our attributions. We have a tendency to assess our own behaviours as normal and appropriate and those of strangers more negatively. It is self-evident that this can easily lead to misjudgements. We also tend to attribute our positive behaviours to personal dispositions and the negative ones to situational factors. Quite the opposite happens when we make attributions about strangers’ behaviours; then we tend to overestimate the influence of personal dispositions and underestimate the influence of situational factors. This is called the fundamental attribution error.

In the context of intercultural encounters we must therefore always proceed from the assumption that the behaviours of cultural strangers are more likely to be seen as »negative«. Since they often do not match our own cultural preconceptions and expectations we are less willing to concede »mitigating circumstances« and prefer instead to seek explanations in the traits and characteristics which are allegedly inherent in the stranger.

When looking for causal explanations for behaviours we are always inclined to make value judgements. There are several biases that affect our attributions. We have a tendency to assess our own behaviours as normal and appropriate and those of strangers more negatively. It is self-evident that this can easily lead to misjudgements. We also tend to attribute our positive behaviours to personal dispositions and the negative ones to situational factors. Quite the opposite happens when we make attributions about strangers’ behaviours; then we tend to over-estimate the influence of personal dispositions and under-estimate the influence of situational factors. This is called the fundamental attribution error.

In the context of intercultural encounters we must therefore always proceed from the assumption that the behaviours of cultural strangers are more likely to be seen as »negative«. Since they often do not match our own cultural preconceptions and expectations we are less willing to concede »mitigating circumstances« and prefer instead to seek explanations in the traits and characteristics which are allegedly inherent in the stranger.

Source: "Intercultural Competence - Xpert Culture Communication® Skills" by Prof. Juliana Roth, Christoph Köck, 2002 Stuttgart und Bayrischer Volkshochschulverband e.V. München, 2009 English Version, ISBN 978-3-86718-201-3, page 38-42