How do humans understand, or in other words attribute meaning to, messages
across cultures? This inquiry leads to analyses of meaning in written or spoken
utterances and their relationship to cognitive processes. Some communication
models attempt to accommodate the fact that meanings are culturally based and
therefore differ from culture to culture, but this paper proposes a model that
shows how meanings are generated from the attributions by the perceiver as well
as from knowledge of the actual culture. Individuals project mental schemata of
unfamiliar cultures. Furthermore, as uncertainty is reduced by cognitive under
standing, schemata can grow more to resemble the actual culture. But the
induction of information does not always result in improved intercultural
communication; an individual's attitudes and evaluations can become unaccept
ing, negatively evaluating, and ultimately antagonistic toward the other culture.
Often this hostile position is triggered by feelings of distrust because of the gulf
between what was previously projected about the unfamiliar culture and reality.
When this cognitive dissonance occurs, intercultural communication appears
unlikely to succeed. The model is applied to a historical case study: the first
official trade encounter between members of a trade mission from Great Britain
and Emperor Qian Long's court in China. Seven hypotheses for future research
are proposed.
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