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demonstration effect — English
The mutual influence of the traditions, cultural practices, lifestyles, values and norms of different peoples on those of other communities or groups of people. It is a term closely related to acculturation (see “acculturation”), but it usually involves smaller groups and less encompassing behaviour patterns than in acculturation. While acculturation is mostly a one-way process, demonstration effect is mostly a two-way process (that is, a mutual process); this is, however, not a hard and fast rule. The presence of visitors or officials in a group of people with different traditional and cultural practices and value systems might affect both groups simply because they start to copy one another. Tourism provides the ideal conditions for this copy-cat behaviour. It might be a completely involuntary action, but when one group of people sees how other groups of people live, they start to copy certain practices of those people. Tourists, travellers and diplomatic staff from Western countries learnt to eat sushi in the Far East and introduced it to their friends, guests and associates in their home countries. It caught on, and today sushi is a delicacy enjoyed in Western Europe, the USA and even South Africa. Tourists, who enjoyed eating mopani worms while visiting South Africa, might introduce it as a delicacy in their home countries. This will, of course, not change the entire culture of the tourists’ home countries. Similarly, the wearing of sunglasses by people who have seen tourists wearing sunglasses will not cause acculturation. Demonstration effect is essentially copy-catting of superficial cultural and social behaviour, and it applies to less encompassing customs and practices than acculturation does. The latter applies to entire lifestyles, cultures, belief systems and world views, while the former applies to copying simple behaviour patterns, food, fads and single phenomena. A typical example of demonstration effect is the wedding ceremonies of modern black South Africans. While they have not at all abandoned their traditional marital rites and ceremonies, they now have two separate wedding ceremonies, one of which is a formal “white-dress” ceremony typical of the white South Africans’ wedding ceremony. However, white South Africans have not incorporated any elements of the traditional black Africans’ wedding practices into their own wedding ceremonies.
