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.At the beginning, stereotype-inconsistent information received agreater amount of discursive attention, more likely to receive immediategrounding and less likely to receive assumed grounding than stereotypeconsistent information.The conversants were more likely to use exclama-tions, evaluation, or speculations in relation to stereotype-inconsistent in-formation, relative to stereotype-consistent information, as an acknowledg-ment of the inconsistency and unexpectedness.These finding are in lineTABLE 10.1Ratings Made by the Participants and the Typesof Grounding in the ConversationsP1 P2 P3 P4 P5Intelligent 1 4 5 6 7Thoughtful 1 5 7 5 8Caring 4 6 5 7 8Sensitive 2 10 6 8 7C1 C2 C3 C4Contribution.4.4.5.6Assumed Grounding.9.5  a.3Immediate Grounding.3.5.6.7Self-Content Relation.2.4.6.6Note.P stands for participant; C stands for conversation.Ratings were done on a 10-pointscale (1 = strongly disagree; 10 = strongly agree).Contribution, assumed grounding, immediategrounding, self-content relation = proportion of contribution, assumed grounding, immediategrounding, and self-content relationships for stereotype consistent information relative to thesum for both stereotype consistent and inconsistent information.The average values for thestereotype consistent and inconsistent information were summed for each conversation, andthe value for stereotype consistent information was divided by the sum:.5 indicates that a giventype of grounding took place equally frequently for both SC and SI; a number above.5 suggeststhat a given type of grounding was more frequent for SC than for SI information.aNo assumed grounding took place.TLFeBOOK10.THE MICROGENESIS OF CULTURE 253with our expectations that stereotype-inconsistent information would beharder to ground and would therefore require more elaborate negotiationin order to establish it as mutual knowledge.However, toward the end ofthe reproduction chain, all these differences were reversed.This reversalmay be explained in terms of the individuation of Gary.As observed in theimpression ratings of Gary, although the participants held the impressionof  Gary the footballer at the beginning of the chain, this changed to  Garythe person, thus removing the footballer stereotype from the central frameof reference for the later conversations.Furthermore, this new  Gary theperson was constructed in those terms that were inconsistent with thefootballer stereotype.So what do these results say about communication as a mechanism ofcultural dynamics? In this serial reproduction chain, conversants haveclearly been engaged in a process of meaning making in which they havenegotiated Gary s characteristics so as to make sense of the narrated event.Gary, who was originally portrayed as a stereotypical drink driving foot-baller, became a sensitive, caring guy who was unlikely to have been delib-erately drink-driving and must have been a victim of peer-group pressure!This illustrates both the maintenance of an existing stereotype and the cre-ation of a new  subtype in communication.At one level, in order to makesense of Gary, he was taken out of the footballer category, and the stereo-type inconsistencies were reconciled by focusing on Gary the person.This re-fencing (Allport, 1954) of the footballer stereotype makes Gary an ex-ception to it, and in many ways actually serves to maintain the stereotype(for a similar argument, see Weber & Crocker, 1983).At another level, how-ever, we may have witnessed the emergence of a new subtype of football-ers in this microgenesis of cultural discourse.Gary as a  sensitive, NewAge footballer is potentially a new meaning created in the experiment, andmay be added to the shared culture as part of a meaning system.It is anopen question whether this new meaning moves into the cultural discourseoutside this particular experimental group, and is retained within the stu-dent body of the particular university where the study was conducted, oreven in the larger collective of Australians as a whole.CONCLUDING COMMENTSIn this chapter, we argued that cultural dynamics is fundamentally cogni-tive and communicative processes.It is the cognition that presupposescommunication, and the communication that is backed by cognition, whichcontributes to the maintenance and transformation of human culture.Torecapitulate our argument, we first outlined two contrasting, but comple-mentary images of culture as a meaning system and meaning making proc-TLFeBOOK254 MCINTYRE ET AL.ess.It is clear that concrete individuals meaning-making activities in par-ticular contexts would generate, maintain, and transform what may beregarded as a context-general meaning system.In our framework, commu-nication processes by which communicators work toward establishing amutual understanding, or grounding information to common ground, arecentral to this.There are at least two theoretical approaches to the micro-genesis of culture.One conceptualizes a large collective as consisting ofoverlapping small groups, and the other regards it as a complex social net-work.We argued that the serial reproduction paradigm captures some ofthe more important aspects of interpersonal communications through a so-cial network.This view of the serial reproduction paradigm invites a reconsiderationof the property of the method, which was after all popularized throughBartlett s book on memory [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]