In the waiting area three people from Switzerland are sitting in front of me and somehow I am wondering why I am so certain that they are from Switzerland. I haven’t heard them talk nor have I seen their passports but I am still pretty certain that they are Swiss. Are the cultural and behavioural patterns so obvious to recognise? Can we separate and classify people according to their behaviour? In a certain way we can and the three Swiss are the best example for this. In this waiting hall are many people from Switzerland and for most of them I couldn’t tell whether they are Swiss or not. So how comes that for some people we are so certain?
On the one hand it must be linked to our clichés which we have towards certain people from certain countries. People who correspond to the image of a typical Swiss are automatically classified as Swiss in our brain without waiting for any proof. Maybe the three guys in front of me are Austrians but I am not convinced by that idea, it doesn’t appeal to me. Our mind is biased because now that I have unintentionally classified those three as Swiss I cannot reclassify them. Once a person is classified he or she will remain in this class. In that sense I am still the “allemand” for all my friends although I have been living in France for 9 years now. Once a person has been classified by our brain, we are automatically looking for characteristics that confirm and underline that classification. The three Swiss seem to be slow; they are badly dressed and seem insecure so far away from their home country. Of course this is all bullshit but my brain tries unconsciously to find typical characteristics that could confirm its initial classification. And surprisingly enough my brain finds those characteristics even if it needs to ignore its observations, because in reality those characteristics are not those of the people observed but a product of pure imagination.
The fact that one of them is reading a two days old newspaper isn’t a proof that he is slow. Maybe there is some news inside that he wants to read or he is simply happy to read a German speaking paper. I would probably feel the same after a while in a non-German speaking country. Does that make me a Swiss?Probably not, but the two days old newspaper is not getting out of my mind.
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