Search

This article presents a theory of the perception of hybrids, resulting from cross-breeding natural animals that pertain to different species and of children parented by couples with a mixed ethnic or racial background. The theory states that natural living beings, including humans, are perceived as possessing a deeply ingrained characteristic that is called ‘essence’ or ‘blood’ or ‘genes’ in everyday discourse and that uniquely determines their category membership. If, by whatever means, the genes or essences of two animals of different species are combined in a hybrid, the two incompatible essences collapse, leaving the hybrid in a state of non-identity and non-belonging. People despise this state and reject the hybrid (Study 1). This devaluation effect holds with cross-kind hybrids and with hybrids that arise from genetically combining animals from incompatible habitats across three cultures: Austria, India and Japan (Study 2). In the social world, groups and ethnic or racial categories frequently are essentialized in an analogue way. When people with an essentialist mindset judge ethnically or racially mixed offspring, they perceive a collapse of ethnic or racial essence and, consequently, denigrate these children, as compared to children from ‘pure’ in-group or out-group parents (Study 3). The findings are discussed in terms of the widespread ‘yuck factor’ against genetically modified animals, in terms of the cultural concepts of monstrosity and of racism and prejudice.

Using data from policy analyses, media analyses and a European-wide survey about public perceptions of biotechnology conducted in 1996 and again in 1999, it is shown how a country's public develops an everyday understanding of a new technology (genetic modification) construed as potentially harmful by the media. To understand the reliance on images and related beliefs, we propose a theory of collective symbolic coping. It identifies four steps: first, the creation of awareness; second, production of divergent images; third, convergence upon a couple of dominant images in the public sphere; fourth, normalization. It is suggested that symbolic coping occurs in countries where a recent increase in policy activity and of media reporting has alerted the public; that this public show a high proportion of beliefs in menacing images; that these beliefs are relatively independent of pre-existing popular science knowledge; and that they are functionally equivalent to scientific knowledge in providing judgmental confidence and reducing self-ascribed ignorance. These propositions are shown to be true in Austria and Greece. Several implications of the theory are discussed, including social representation theory and public understanding of science.

Growing globalisation of the world draws attention to cultural differences between people from different countries or from different cultures within the countries. Notwithstanding the diversity of people’s worldviews, current cross-cultural research still faces the challenge of how to avoid ethnocentrism; comparing Western-driven phenomena with like variables across countries without checking their conceptual equivalence clearly is highly problematic. In the present article we argue that simple comparison of measurements (in the quantitative domain) or of semantic interpretations (in the qualitative domain) across cultures easily leads to inadequate results. Questionnaire items or text produced in interviews or via open-ended questions have culturally laden meanings and cannot be mapped onto the same semantic metric. We call the culture-specific space and relationship between variables or meanings a ’cultural metric’, that is a set of notions that are inter-related and that mutually specify each other’s meaning. We illustrate the problems and their possible solutions with examples from quantitative and qualitative research. The suggested methods allow to respect the semantic space of notions in cultures and language groups and the resulting similarities or differences between cultures can be better understood and interpreted.

One of the most frequently mentioned quotes in social representations literature is Serge Moscovici’s claim that the “purpose of all representations is to make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar” (1984/2001, 37). This short quote not only highlights the importance of sense-making activities but also implies the active role of social actors in understanding their worlds: the familiar is always familiar to somebody, and there is no familiarity in itself. Consequently, Moscovici concludes, a social representation of an object tells more about a group’s identity than about the nature of this object. Social representations denote what “the group thinks of itself in its relationships with the objects which affect it” (Durkheim 1895/1982, 40; cf. Moscovici and Vignaux 1994/2001, 158). Our membership in social groups constrains the ways in which we come to understand an object, and conversely, by positioning oneself with regard to an object and by the style we communicate about it, we ascertain our belonging to a particular group of people, and simultaneously distance ourselves from others (cf. Duveen and Lloyd 1986). “Just as the water level in communicating vessels changes when the content is altered at only one point, the act of categorizing an object similarly places the individual in his or her rightful place, like a bilateral lever arm whose axis is fixed in the social field common to both” (Wagner and Hayes 2005, 207; cf. Clemence 2001; Harre and van Langenhove 1999).

This study describes metaphorical conceptualizations of the foreign exchange market held by market participants and examines how these metaphors socially construct the financial market. Findings are based on 55 semi-structured interviews with senior foreign exchange experts at banks and at financial news providers in Europe. We analysed interview transcripts by metaphor analysis, a method based on cognitive linguistics. Results indicate that market participants' understanding of financial markets revolves around seven metaphors, namely the market as a bazaar, as a machine, as gambling, as sports, as war, as a living being and as an ocean. Each of these metaphors highlights and conceals certain aspects of the foreign exchange market and entails a different set of implications on crucial market dimensions, such as the role of other market participants and market predictability. A correspondence analysis supports our assumption that metaphorical thinking corresponds with implicit assumptions about market predictability. A comparison of deliberately generated and implicitly used metaphors reveals notable differences. In particular, implicit metaphors are predominantly organic rather than mechanical. In contrast to academic models, interactive and organic metaphors, and not the machine metaphor, dominate the market accounts of participants.