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DOI: 10.1177/002194369503200203 A Schemata Model for Intercultural Encounters and Case Study: The Emperor and the EnvoyCalifornia State University, Los Angeles 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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