Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Verbal and Non-verbal Code

A lot of countries, such as America, have low-context cultures, where people speak more verbally and express themselves easily. However, in countries like China, Japan and Korea (high-context cultures), people usually use mainly the non-verbal code and they are expected to read and infer from the environment (the context), rather than saying something directly. Do you think that the difference communication codes affect how different countries communicate with each other? Why or why not? Do you think that this difference has made it more difficult for people from different countries to communicate (therefore, causing more misunderstanding)?

6 comments:

  1. Ooo reminds me of ICS 7! This is really applicable now-a-days, because most countries have english taught in schools as a second language, promoting this concept of universal communication. While low-context communicators might seem to direct or aggressive, especially if they're decisive speakers, I think the difficulty lies more in high-context people not being able to say what they mean, because they infer it in their actions rather than in their words.

    For example, I know in the German culture that you separate work and leisure, so when you're at home or at the bar, you don't talk about business, because work is for work time; likewise, when you're at work, you don't daydream or talk about what you did over the weekend, work is work time.

    I think as long as we all have a sort of cultural empathy, that we can understand that this person doesn't know our culture, and thus give them a bit of breathing room if they violate it, or maybe even have the confidence to promote ourselves from low context to high context, everything should be fine.

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  2. I think that the differences between cultural communication makes things a lot more difficult to understand. The fact is that one gesture in a culture might be perceived in the opposite way in another culture and because of this it makes communicating very difficult. This is shown throughout a lot of businesses because whenever they do business in other countries their representatives are often taught the gestures, mannerisms and other codes in order to prevent any offense. This could also be seen in terms of casual get together's with families or different cultures because they might greet or say good bye in a different way than one would be used too.

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  4. Allen Pease wrote some good books on Non-verbal communication. Check them out when you have the chance. One thing I can say about this is the more you know the better you position yourself against any cultures.- Tu Nguyen

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  5. yeah it does make some difficulties to communicate between people with high context culture and the low context one. high context people will assume that low context people know what they are discussing, but sometimes low context people will expect high context people to explain the background beforehand. it will cause some misunderstanding

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  6. yes i think it does create difficulties to an extent for two cultures to communicate. And I agree with Patrick, others of the different culture might really not understand what you are doing or saying, and take it offensively.

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