The Stone Soup Experiment : Why Cultural Boundaries Persist.

The Stone Soup Experiment is the story of an ambitious classroom simulation. In her course on cross-cultural communication, Wilson (communication, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) began by randomly assigning each of her students to one of two cultures: Traders or Stoners. In the ten weeks that followed, she and the students became participant-observers. They reported on allegiances and prejudices, commitment and conflicts, as the Trader and Stoner cultures were shaped by their members, and vice versa. Heavily seasoned with excerpts from student ethnographies, the book reads like a novel. There are plenty of plot twists (theft, betrayal, refusal to reconcile) as the students, and at times their instructor, experience a full range of preconceptions and partialities, including ethnocentrism, hindsight bias, and confirmation bias. Through it all, Wilson's voice is deeply reflective and honest. Integrating perspectives on groups, culture, and communication from a broad swath of the social sciences (e.g., psychology, communication studies, sociology, anthropology), the book's theoretical perspective is fresh. Warning: faculty readers may be inspired to new levels of daring in the classroom. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Sarai Blincoe, Longwood University