Interculturality - Perception and Expectations

Perception takes place essentially as a hypothesis-guided search process. The expectations or hypotheses that are built up during this search process are based on already existing and individually very different experiences and knowledge. New  knowledge and experiences are compared with already existing patterns and assigned to them. If experiences and expectations do not match, this leads under the premise "There should be a meaning!" either to an "unfair" assignment of the experience to an only conditionally suitable expectation pattern or (in the positive case) to a correction, differentiation and expansion of the expectation pattern.

The more diverse our experiences are, the more open and thus flexible must be the patterns with which we act. If, on the other hand, we have only a few (and always the same) experiences, the patterns with which we interpret and construct realities harden. Our possibilities of interpretation are then smaller, so that we tend either not to tolerate the unknown at all or to classify it "stereotypically" or in a relatively fixed pattern network.

The core of cultural knowledge stocks is often handed down over centuries as relatively fixed pattern networks - analogous to the lower layers of a sand mountain. They have proven themselves again and again as tools for interpretation and problem solving in historically progressing life-world contexts and therefore appear plausible. Since transmission processes take place communicatively, cultural knowledge stocks are at the same time a product of communication and a basis for communication. They thus essentially shape the communication, thinking and action style of those who are socialised in this mediation context. The more restricted and closed this context of mediation is (e.g. due to lack of media diversity, lack of travel opportunities, strict formation of canons), the greater is the collective indifference and binding nature of the common knowledge stock. Conversely, the more diverse the possibilities of experience of the individual in a transmission process (in that facts can be thematised and questioned), the greater the individual deviations from the underlying cultural knowledge stock and the correspondingly lower is the binding nature of a "common" cultural style.