The Culture's Impact On Perception Of Others' Behaviors And Actions (essay).

Cultural orientation and perception of behaviors

Culture often affects how individuals perceive others’ behaviours, actions and use of words. The paper will discuss the topic. Cultural orientation helps in perceiving the behaviours shown by others. Depending on the similarity and dissimilarity of the behaviour, the groups are considered either an ingroup or an outgroup (Abbink and Harris 2019).

Culture can shape our view of the world around us. Cultural orientation often guides the perception of information from the surroundings. It affects the brain's processing in its process of interpreting the visual information gathered about the actions of others. The culture shapes the way one works, plays and acts. This cultural aspect colours the value system in individuals and thus sets the parameters which measure the right and wrongs in the individuals.  This is how the perception of others actions are also done (De Mooij 2021). For example, in one culture, touching the feet of the adults to seek their blessings are considered important whereas in some other cultures, one needs to bow before the Adults to show their respect. This is the cultural difference that makes us think and perceive the behaviours of others. Categorisation of the people is done based on the customs and institutions that one has learned through their cultural identity. The racial, religious and ethnic identity provides the members with their teachings which are then used to categorise the people of the other ethnic and racial communities. The cultural influence is so strong that people often tend to forget that other people who belong to other communities might have other beliefs and their unique identities. At times this inability to accept or perceive the difference gives rise to strong negative feelings like hatred and biasness (Bower 2020).

 The social categorisation can lead to various negative consequences like the target populat)ion can be stereotyped against. The social categorisation can lead to further segregation of the society into ingroups towards which the group members show positive emotions and are emotionally involved with the group, and the outgroup, with which the ingroup members show dislike or are perceived to be potentially dangerous (Frain 2016). 

Language or words were spoken often colours the perception of people around. Even if a slight difference exists in language, the said statement can give rise to stereotypical thoughts about the other community. Language is often considered to be a social, psychological and cultural phenomenon. Language is the most important aspect of the culture as it is through which people communicate with others and it colours the sense of the different cultures. Words spoken to communicate are coloured by the core cultural component of the society. Often cultural and linguistic diversity is not perceived on a positive note and thus resulting in racial discrimination (Piller 2016). 

It can be concluded from the above discussion that one’s culture influences the way the words and actions of the other person will be perceived. One’s cultural identity colours the perception of the other person’s culture to the extent to which they can be discriminated against or stereotyped against.  

References

Abbink, K. and Harris, D., 2019. In-group favouritism and out-group discrimination in naturally occurring groups. PloS one, 14(9), p.e0221616.

Bower, G.H., 2020. Mood congruity of social judgments. Emotion and social judgments, pp.31-53.

De Mooij, M., 2021. Global marketing and advertising: Understanding cultural paradoxes. Sage.

Frain, A., 2016. Transference and social categorisation (Doctoral dissertation, The Australian National University (Australia)).

Piller, I., 2016. Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press.