I talked to my friend from Thailand about Europe and stereotyping, she studied at Germany first, then went to an Erasmus Program in Italy and now her Erasmus Program is over and she soon got to go back to Germany, she kind of feels unhappy. But I talked a bit with her and I showed her after a funny Quote:
it's basically just a joke, but in every joke there is a truth.
I was thinking a bit about prejudices and stereotyping myself and did some small research on the internet (just googling)
let's first look on the negative things first as negative things usually gets our attention first.
I love pictures or Tables as they tell a lot with little effort.
So let's look first on myself.
Lonely? Yes some times I feel lonely, Swiss people tend to be not open to new things, new things is a thread. So they dont connect easy with new people, if people die in Switzerland, nobody might even notice or come to your funeral.
know it all? Swiss tend to perfecting everything and to improve things you heavily depend on knowledge, we make jokes about people that know it all, specially teachers. So I am pretty sure other people see as as know it all, because we definetly know it better :D haha :D
now lets look at another table.
Greece and Polish seem to think mostly positive about their own country
While everyone seem to think that Germans are the most trusted, but also the most arrogant and least compassionate
Are prejudices good or bad?
We use opinions to make our life easier, if you experienced that today the grass is green, then you expect it to be green tommorrow aswell, if you save this information like that you dont need to check the colour of grass every day.
so prejudices help us to experience the world faster, but prejudices are also bad because they put our opinions (mostly negative ones) in a fixed scheme, people think in a box, if you can think outside of the box it's nice, but thinking inside the box is more easy and convienient.
Do you experiene prejudices as something funny, bad or positive?
I love talking to other people's about different cultures and specially the difference, the difference is like different tastes. I don't eat the same food every day, I love variety, so I think with people it is the same, it might be difficult working with people that think different, but it helps us to get smarter and be more creative and innovative.