A Schemata Model for Intercultural Encounters and Case Study: The Emperor and the Envoy

How do humans understand, or in other words attribute meaning to, messagesacross cultures? This inquiry leads to analyses of meaning in written or spokenutterances and their relationship to cognitive processes. Some communicationmodels attempt to accommodate the fact that meanings are culturally based andtherefore differ from culture to culture, but this paper proposes a model thatshows how meanings are generated from the attributions by the perceiver as wellas from knowledge of the actual culture. Individuals project mental schemata ofunfamiliar cultures. Furthermore, as uncertainty is reduced by cognitive understanding, schemata can grow more to resemble the actual culture. But theinduction of information does not always result in improved interculturalcommunication; an individual's attitudes and evaluations can become unaccepting, negatively evaluating, and ultimately antagonistic toward the other culture.Often this hostile position is triggered by feelings of distrust because of the gulfbetween what was previously projected about the unfamiliar culture and reality.When this cognitive dissonance occurs, intercultural communication appearsunlikely to succeed. The model is applied to a historical case study: the firstofficial trade encounter between members of a trade mission from Great Britainand Emperor Qian Long's court in China. Seven hypotheses for future researchare proposed.