CHINESE CULTURE AND WESTERN PERCEPTIONS

This research examines cross-cultural interactions between Chinese and Westerners. The examination objective is to illustrate how erroneous conclusions may be drawn by Westerners interacting with Chinese when those Westerners lack a knowledge and appreciation of the norms, practices, and values of Chinese culture, and the socialization process in that culture.

Social identity theory serves as the conceptual basis for this examination. Social identity is defined as "the individual's knowledge" of personal membership in specific social groups, together with the "emotional value and significance" placed on such membership by the individual (Tajfel, 1972, p. 31). Social identity, thus, is closely related to self-concept.

Individuals apply the process of categorization to "partition the world into comprehensible units" (Abrams & Hogg, 1994, p. 2). This process is accorded a central role in social identity theory. Categorization "involves the psychological accentuation of differences between categories and the attenuation of differences between objects within categories" (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963, pp. 101-114). Accentuation occurs only on those dimensions believed by an individual to be correlated with the categorization process (Abrams & Hogg, p. 3). An individual can derive "a sense of involvement, concern and pride . . . from one's knowledge of sharing a social category membership with ot

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at this explanation fails to account for "the processes that related self-perception to social behavior," and that such an accounting can be provided by self-awareness theory. Self-awareness theory is concerned with the ways through which individuals control and direct their behavior (Wicklund, 1975, pp. 233-276). Within a sociological context, the relationship between self-awareness and social identity is perceived as a realization by an individual of variations between their own self-image and the ideal self-image associated with a salient reference group, and a response by an individual to such a realization (Abrams, p. 90). Within the context of cognitive psychology, the self-awareness/social identity relationship is described in "terms of control theory, in which negative feedback loops operate to enable individuals to match their behaviour to particular standards" (pp. 90-91). In essence, these two perceptions are virtually identical, with differences between the two couched within the semantics of opposing academic disciplines. Chinese tend to differ from Westerners within the contexts of the integration-inwardness and reputation-morality dimensions (Bond, 1991, pp. 137-152). Chinese culture tends to value all of thes
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Approximate Word count = 1713
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)