Stereotypes in Cross Cultural Communication ragarding Germans

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,5 (A), University of Lincoln (International Business Administration), language: English, abstract: Where do stereotypes come from? Can stereotypes be changed? Do stereotypes represent a culture? Streotypes - structured sets of beliefs about the characteristics of members of social categories - influence how people attend to, encode, represent and retrieve information about others and how they judge and respond to them. We develop stereotypes when we are unable or unwilling to obtain all of the information we would need to make fair judgement about people or situations. In the absence of the 'total picture', stereotypes in many cases allow us to 'fill in the blanks'. Society often innocently creates and persuates stereotypes. Can they lead to unfair discrimination or even persuation when they are unfavorable? This assignment will give a comprehensive overview of the term - stereotype - in general and highlight the approach to the common german stereotype integrating wether this stereotype provides an accurate picture of the german people or remains a generalization which is not representative.