Question

Find an example in your own experience of a communication-related challenge stemming from the difference between high and low context in culture. Identify any potential misunderstanding or difficulty that you may have observed in interpreting an individual’s intended meaning. For example, if someone from a different culture seems too direct (low context), the exchange can seem, incorrectly, to imply a harsh tone, while being too indirect (high context) can seem, incorrectly, to reflect fear or hesitation. Try to reason how some knowledge of high versus low context in different cultures might have helped avoid any confusion. [Week 4 Video 2.] Consider the various cultural dimensions under the broad heading of proxemics, including proxemics itself (physical distance), oculesics (eye contact, such as length of gaze), vocalics (use of voice, such as inflection or loudness), chronemics (time-sequencing in conversation), kinesics (body language), or haptics (physical touch as a part of regular communication). Identify an example from your own experience in which one or more of these dimensions was at play in creating some manner of confusion in interpreting someone’s intent. For example, ample misunderstandings can result from failing to understand hand-holding between men in certain cultures, touching the other person’s arm during a normal conversation, or appearing to gaze a bit too long due to different cultural norms. Please use at least 2 references and in text citation.

Answer 1

Answer:

Example in our own experience of a communication-related challenge stemming from the difference between high and low context in culture as below:

Loudness communication in India whereas Calm communication at UK/England: The communication culture greatly varies with India and England. The Indian people use to speak loudly so that they can communicate effectively whereas UK/England people use calm communication. This is a cultural difference. UK/England people do not like loud communication.

I visited to UK and try to communicate in the way I use to communicate at India, but I was not impressing UK people and they are not willing to listen to me unless I make my communicate approach similar to them. I struggled a lot during my visit to UK and I could not be able to make meaningful communication to UK people during my visit due to my communication culture.

Potential misunderstanding or difficulty that I have observed in interpreting an individual’s intended meaning is that UK people do not like speaking loudly and they intend to have calm discussion. UK people prefer low context and not high context. They take our tone as harsh tone. This creates fear and hesitation among them and they feel uncomfortable with loud tone and harsh tone.

Thus the cultural knowledge of high and low context is very essential for any culture change and such learning is useful for me.

We need to focus on following cultural dimensions for communication with UK people

· Proxemics itself (physical distance) – Required at UK

· Oculesics (eye contact, such as length of gaze) – Gazing to be minimum

· Vocalics (use of voice, such as inflection or loudness),- Calm voice

· Chronemics (time-sequencing in conversation), - sequenced communication required

· Kinesics (body language), - professional body language

· Haptics (physical touch as a part of regular communication) – not allowed

Two references as below

· Gardner, G. H. (1962). Cross cultural communication. The Journal of Social Psychology, 58(2), 241-256.

· Klitmøller, A., & Lauring, J. (2013). When global virtual teams share knowledge: Media richness, cultural difference and language commonality. Journal of world business, 48(3), 398-406.

· Bennett, M. J. (1998). Intercultural communication: A current perspective. Basic concepts of intercultural communication: Selected readings, (1), 1-34.