Question

tell me how you see your culture has played a part in your current listening and verbal communication skills.

Next, with all the different cultures in mind, tell me all the ways you disagree with the following statement, "To produce understandable messages, we have to abide by the cooperative principle." Add to this all of the negative aspects of the principle you can find.

Lastly, give me a specific example from your life when you failed to demonstrate the cooperative principle and what happened as a result.

Answer 1

Culture is a set of shared values that a group of people holds. They affect how you think and act. It is a kind of criteria by which you judge others. Cultural meanings render some behaviors as normal and right and others strange or wrong.

Culture has rules that its members take for granted. Few of us are aware of our own biases because cultural imprinting is begun at a very early age. And while some of culture’s knowledge, rules, beliefs, values, phobias and anxieties are taught clearly, most is absorbed subconsciously.

Cultures are either high-context or low-context:

All aspects of global communication are influenced by cultural differences. Even the choice of medium used to communicate may have cultural overtones. For instance, it has been noted that industrialized nations rely greatly on electronic technology and stress written messages over oral or face-to-face communication. Undoubtedly the United States, Canada, the UK and Germany exemplify this trend.

Japan, which has access to the hottest technologies, still relies more on face-to-face communications than on the written mode. The determining factor in medium preference may not be the degree of industrialization, but rather whether the country falls into a high-context or low-context culture.

In a few cultures, personal bonds and casual agreements are far more binding than any formal contract. In others, the careful wording of legal documents is viewed as paramount. High-context cultures (Mediterranean, Slav, Central European, Latin American, African, Arab, Asian, American-Indian) leave much of the message unspecified – to be understood through context, nonverbal cues, and between-the-lines interpretation of what is actually said.

Low-context cultures (most of the Germanic and English-speaking countries) expect messages to be plain and specific. The former are looking for meaning and understanding in what is not said – in body language, in silences and pauses, and in relationships and empathy. The latter place stress on sending and receiving accurate messages frankly, and by being precise with spoken or written words.

A communication trap that U.S. business leaders may fall into is a disregard for the significance of building and maintaining personal relationships when dealing with individuals from high-context cultures.

We are all persons, and no two people belonging to the same culture are guaranteed to respond in exactly the same way. Generalizations are valid to the extent that they provide clues on what you will most likely meet – and how those differences affect communication. Here are three such generalizations.