• roboRoboat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know why you got downvoted so hard, lol. I think this is definitely a factor, whether it’s fair or not. Maybe not the primary one, but an important one nonetheless. American perceptions of foreign cultures certainly bleed into how we perceive the products they manufacture.

    It might be a “chicken and the egg” sort of thing, but classic stereotypes match up pretty well imo. Americans think the Japanese are fastidious and hyper focused on reputation; Germans innovate but over-engineer things to to a fault; Italians are passionate but put aesthetics and performance first, and the French just don’t want to work. Those stereotypes are still rampant in all our media and absolutely influence how we perceive the products they sell us, true or not.

    • rufus
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      1 year ago

      i think this got downvoted for being a plain wrong answer. while this sounds kind of believable, i bet some stereotypes play a very minor role. compared for example to some japanese cars being awarded excellent scores in crash tests and winning in comparisons of car magazines for years in a row.

      • roboRoboat@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, you’re probably right. I would still argue that generalized culture perceptions play a role, but early Japanese cars and other products certainly earned their good reputations.

      • jeltebr@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Haha damn I’m not downplaying the quality of those cars, it’s just a general stereotype I see a lot. I’m really happy with my own Japanese car, and yes it’s because of the genuine quality of it.

        • rufus
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          1 year ago

          You’re right this is the stereotype with ‘japanese people’. But you got to be careful with stereotypes. Even if you hear them a lot.

          People don’t like if you tell them “that’s the two character traits we’ve assigned for you”. Or it may be something that has been wrong for a long time and you’re the one helping to repeat false information. It may cause all sorts of misunderstandings. Especially for the person in the group who doesn’t comply to that… Just be careful with stereotypes. It’s kind of okay in this case, because we’re discussing the stereotype on a meta level, and it’s not that much of a deal to talk about stereotypes, but in real life i’d just keep it to myself.

          • jeltebr@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            Exactly that, it’s a question I answered, therefore I can’t ignore the fact that “people” have these stereotypes. I get what you mean with repeating these stereotypes, but it would be weird if that would make an answer more or less incorrect/insufficient. Emphasis on “people”, I myself don’t have any strong feelings about these stereotypes.

            Having said that, these are things that will always exist in my eyes, people will try to get an indication of a person as soon as possible, even without the proper information, but that is a whole other psychological discussion.