The largest worry many travelers have when exploring is appearing to be a stereotypical (insert nationality). These stereotypes can vary by nation, ethnicity, race, or many other factors. The phenomen of deciding how entire groups of people act in simple way is part of the human condition, and while can harmless and humourless situations can arise, dangerous conditions can also be created.
During the recent trip to a local Italian high school I asked two Italian students, grade 3 or 11th in the American system, what they thought an American looked like. "Americans are fat, loud, and wear visors", they replied. As much as this hurt, it was a humerus reply. However, the mechanism that leads to these harmless assumption are the same that lead to racism and discrimination. These generalized operant behaviors can be found to be explained by Relational Frame Theory (RFT).
RFT states that when one condition is linked to another two separate conditions then those two unreinforced conditions become linked. An example was given in which students are taught men and women are opposite genders, and men are strong, they associated women with weak as "...a relational network of trained and derrived stimulus relations pertaining to gender has been established" (Roche, B., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D., Stewart, I., & O’Hara, D., 2002). This can be applied to many other derrived stereotypical traits and attributes.
Well once negative behavior has been established, how do we treat it? Acceptance, Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a derrived work from RFT in which we try and exploit the same process used to create negative behavior and replace it with positive behavior - thoughts being defined as apart of behavior. There are 6 principles of ACT - context, cognitive diffusion, acceptance, self as context, committed action, and values. ACT is often linked with the mindfulness movement, which shares similar principles. Treatment involved things like dettachment, breathing exercises, and meditation The great thing about ACT is it easily taught and can be effective as medications in certain circumstances althought it is recommended to be used with medication treatment. As values driven science begins to increase in presence, data driven treatment become more centerfold.
References
Roche, B., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D., Stewart, I., & O’Hara, D. (2002). Relational Frame Theory: A new paradigm for the analysis of social behavior. The Behavior Analyst, 1(25), 75-91.