Cultural Schema Theory Analysis

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Analyzing Cultural Schema Theory
Laura de Luis Frontal
Theories and Models of Intercultural Communication, University of Jyväskylä

Analyzing Cultural Schema Theory
A great deal has been written and said about communication between people from different cultures. There are many theories that explain the phenomenon in diverse ways, as there are lots of paths that we could take. If we should go deeper and explain how intercultural communication happens, we can see that there is an element that has changed radically intercultural encounters: Globalization.
Before this fact, the only way of being able to have contact with people and cultures around the world was by traveling. However, nowadays innovations in transports, the cheapening of …show more content…

We act depending on what we know about previous situations that can be like the actual one.
As a consequence, we can use schemas in multiple situation, and that lead us to have different sorts of schemas depending on the circumstances: personal schemas, cultural schemas and universal schemas. Nevertheless, what we are going to analyze and criticize in this essay are the cultural schemas as a theory.
In this way, cultural schema theory tries to explain how humans understand the world in terms of culture. People need to know how the others are going to act even though they do not know the others beforehand. In that way, we try to understand people from other cultural backgrounds by making a classification or schema of them.
Literature review
Although Nishida was the main authorn who theorized about the cultural schema theory, there were previous discussions about the main concepts reflected in the …show more content…

Some authors like Taylor and Croucher, Turner or Chi proposed different types of cultural schemas. Nishida (1999) proposed eight “primary social interaction schemas”: fact-and-concept schemas, which are information about facts such as definitions or concepts; person schemas, which contain information about different kinds of people; self-schemas, which gather information about our own personality; role schemas, which are knowledge about the roles in society and how we must act depending on it; context schemas, which are formed by knowledge about the situation and its correct behavior; procedure schemas, which are information about the steps that must being followed in certain situations; strategy schemas, that gather information about problem-solving strategies; and finally, emotion schemas, that get activated while using other schemas and contain information about affect and evaluation stored in long-term

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