Intercultural Communication: Key Concepts

Key Concepts in Intercultural Communication

• Acculturation involves balancing two cultures while adapting to the prevailing societal culture.
• Attribution theory explains how people interpret the causes of behaviors and events.
• A belief is trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.
• Bicultural identity integration is when an individual seamlessly blends two cultural identities.
• Categorization is assigning objects to pre-existing classes or categories.
• Chronemics is the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication.
• Collectivist cultures prioritize cohesion, harmony, duty, interdependence, achievement of group goals, and conflict avoidance.
• Communication is commonly defined as the transmission of information.
• Context is the setting for an event, statement, or idea.
• A creole is a person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America.
• Cultural activities include traditional dancing, storytelling sessions, and theater performances.
• Cultural change emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior.
• Cultural relativism states that concepts and moral values must be understood in their cultural context.
• Discourse is spoken or written communication, especially serious discussion.
• Diversity includes people from different social and ethnic backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations.
• Expectancy violation theory analyzes how individuals respond to unanticipated violations of social norms and expectations.
• Femininity includes attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls.
• High-context cultures focus on underlying context, meaning, and tone in communication.
• Human nature orientation involves friendly behavior or relationships between human beings and the natural environment.
• Individualism asserts that all values, rights, and duties originate in individuals.
• Integration merges concepts and variables from different disciplines or theories for a comprehensive explanation.
• Intercultural communication involves cultural and linguistic differences relevant to interactions.
• Intercultural competence is the ability to function effectively across cultures.
• Kinesics includes hand and arm movements, leg movements, facial expression, eye contact, stance, and posture.
• The linear model describes a continuous response variable as a function of predictor variables.
• Low-context cultures rely on spoken or written words to communicate meaning.
• Marginalization treats someone or something as unimportant.
• Masculinity involves displaying attitudes and behaviors that signify and validate maleness.
• A message is a communication or statement conveyed from one person or group to another.
• Paralanguage conveys meaning through non-lexical tokens.
• Perception involves recognition and interpretation of sensory information.
• Personal/contextual communication style is status and role oriented.
• Power distance is the unequal distribution of power and acceptance of that inequality.
• Pragmatics involves the use of appropriate communication in social situations.
• Relativism denies objective claims within a domain and asserts that valuations are relative to perspective or context.
• The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis proposes that language influences how one thinks about reality.
• The similarity attraction paradigm describes how people are attracted to those they find similar.
• Socialization changes an individual's standards, skills, motives, attitudes, and behaviors to conform to societal expectations.
• A stereotype is an unfair and untrue belief about people or things with a particular characteristic.
• Time orientation provides a framework for organizing personal experiences in temporal categories.
• Transnationalism involves flows and exchanges that take place across national borders.

Key Figures and Theories

• The Chicago School was influential in sociology and criminology in the early 20th century.
• Georg Simmel developed the concept of social distance.
• Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and cornerstone of media theory.
• Shalom Schwartz identified seven cultural values in three pairs.

Communication Components and Characteristics

• Communication components: Feedback, Message, Receiver, Decoding, Encoding, Sender, Context
• Communication characteristics: Concise, Clarity, Coherence, Courteous, Active listening

Culture

• Culture teaches people to acknowledge heritage and worldviews.
• Culture encompasses behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols passed down through generations.
• The inner core of culture includes values, history, identity, and worldviews.
• A worldview is a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world.
• A subculture is a group within a larger culture with differing beliefs or interests.

Values and Dimensions

• Values are a culture's standard for discerning what is good and just.
• Hofstede's four cultural dimensions: individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity-femininity.
• Feminine cultures have overlapping gender roles; an example is Sweden or the Netherlands.
• Value Orientation theory states that every culture faces basic survival needs and universal questions.

Time and Relational Orientation

• US Americans perceive time as rigid, segmented, limited, and linear.
• Relational orientation refers to internal ways of experiencing oneself in relation to others.

Collectivism

• Collectivistic cultures prioritize the group over the individual.

Cultural Taxonomy

• Schwartz’s cultural taxonomy identifies seven cultural values in three pairs.
• Affective autonomy encourages individuals to pursue affectively positive experiences.
• Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Russia exemplify hierarchical cultures.

Identity

• Identity: the qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions that characterize a person or a group.
• Subgroups: are subgroups that are mapped to itself by every automorphism of the parent group.
• National Identity: is characterized by national symbols, languages, colors, the nation's history, blood ties, culture, music, cuisine, radio, television, and so on.
• Features of National Identity: comprises both political and cultural elements
• Ingroups: an exclusive, typically small, group of people with a shared interest or identity.
• Ethnicity differs from race: Race is a social construct, while ethnicity is a shared culture
• Religious identity differs from religiosity: Religious identity is group membership, religiosity is religious activity.

Intercultural Sensitivity

• Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity describes how people experience and interpret cultural differences.

Communication

• Verbal communication includes the words and sounds that come out of our mouths.
• Components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
• Nonverbal communication is the transmission of messages or signals through nonverbal platforms.
• Nonverbal communication includes body language, gestures, facial expressions, and posture.
• Nonverbal communication functions: to convey meaning, regulate interactions, express identities, communicate emotions, and express status and power

Context

• High-context cultures communicate implicitly, relying heavily on context, while low-context cultures rely on explicit verbal communication.
• Proxemics deals with the amount of space that people feel is necessary to set between themselves and others.
• Categories of kinesic behaviors include emblems, illustrators, affect displays, adaptors, and regulators.
• The stages of culture shock are honeymoon, frustration, adjustment, and acceptance.

Cross-cultural Adaptation

• Cross-cultural adaptation is influenced by traits, social perception, stereotypes, ethnocentrism, and cultural intelligence.
• Overt behavior is directly observable, while covert behavior includes hidden thoughts and feelings.
• Anxiety/uncertainty management theory addresses anxiety experienced when interacting with another culture.

Challenges

• The biggest communication problems between US Americans and the Chinese: anxiety, language, stereotypes, prejudice, ethnocentrism
• Ethnocentrism is the evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.