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1 Baron R. Psychology. 4th ed. 1998. p.627.
My purpose was to find out how these exchange students overcame one year in the US, living in a different society and culture, surrounded by different people and social norms. More precisely, I concentrated in such issues as: what did exchange students think about the US before leaving? Did they break these stereotypes? How did they deal with prejudices associated with these stereotypes, and also with discrimination? How did they understand causes of other's behavior? How did they interact with others and what problems they faced? In overall, by doing this research my aim was to get an idea how life in a different society changes attitudes, personality of people: do they become more communicative and adjusting or is it vice versa? In this research I used such methods as interviews and surveys.
Today, students have more opportunities to study in the US. Most of them don't even know what to expect when they"re going there. All they have are American movies from where they establish stereotypes. Stereotypes - cognitive frameworks suggesting that all members of specific social group share certain characteristics.1 I conducted a survey, which showed that all students had possessed stereotypes such as " Americans are fat", "blacks are criminals", and "Americans are friendly". These assumptions were based on minimal information but they helped these students to shape certain notions about them, predict their behavior and just to be ready for interaction. Many of these students have reported at once they found these stereotypes to be false. Those who lived in bigger cities and southern states said that most of the people were slim.
As for the "Americans are friendly", again students had to break this stereotype because it didn't apply to each of them. Moreover, they found many of them "snobbish". So, these students discovered true side of such stereotypes, and formed new ones.