Summary

• Culture is an established, coherent set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices shared by a large group of people.
• Culture is learned from many sources, including parents, teachers, religious leaders, peers, and mass media. As you mature, you learn deeper aspects of your culture, including the history behind certain traditions.
• Each culture has its own practices regarding how to communicate.
• Culture has multiple layers—various traditions, heritages, and practices.
• Culture affects everything about how you live your life (e.g., the way you dress, talk, think), and culture is often a great source of personal pride (e.g., displaying the flag of your country of origin in front of your home).
• As societies become more culturally diverse, one group of people usually emerges with more power to influence or control people and events.
  • Co-Cultural Communication Theory suggests that the people who have more power within a given society determine the society’s dominant culture. For example, the Communist Party has more power in modern China, and communism is the dominant culture.
    • Members of a society who don’t conform to the dominant culture often form co-cultures, which may be based on age, gender, social class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and/or other unifying elements. For example, the LGBTQ community coexists within the dominant culture of the United States as a co-culture.
    • Members of co-cultures may develop communication practices that help them interact with people in the culturally dominant group, such as using overly polite language, suppressing reactions to offensive behavior, and superficially assimilating into the dominant culture (i.e., “passing” for members of the dominant culture). These behaviors relate to the communications theory of ingroupers and outgroupers, in that we might assume, wrongly or rightly, that people who share one of our co-cultural practices also share others.
  • Prejudice occurs when stereotypes reflect rigid attitudes toward groups and their members.
  • According to the Stereotype Content Model, prejudice centers on two judgments made about others: how warm and friendly they are, and how competent they are. These judgments create either benevolent or hostile prejudice.
    • Benevolent prejudice occurs when people think of a particular group as inferior but also friendly and competent. For example, “It’s not their fault—they don’t have the level of education to understand.”
    • Hostile prejudice occurs when people have negative attitudes toward a group of individuals who they see as unfriendly and incompetent. For example, “They’re naturally lazy.”
  • Prejudice, no matter what form, is destructive and unethical.
  • Prejudice is based on deeply held negative beliefs, so the best way to change prejudice is to learn about the cultures toward which you have negative feelings.

• People in individualistic cultures, such as Canada and the United States, tend to value independence and personal achievement.
• People in collectivistic cultures, such as Japan and Pakistan, emphasize group identity, interpersonal harmony, and the well-being of ingroups.
• In high-context cultures, such as China and Japan, people rely less on language than widespread cultural knowledge to convey meaning.
• In low-context cultures, such as Canada and the United States, people strive to be informative, clear, and direct in their communications.
• Uncertainty avoidance relates to the acceptance and tolerance of unpredictability in a given culture.
  • In high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures, like Greece and Portugal, value is placed on control.
• In low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures, such as Denmark and Singapore, people care less about rules, tolerate diversity, and welcome change.
• Display rules are guidelines for when, where, and how to appropriately express emotion. These vary widely across cultures, so it’s important to be aware of these differences when communicating with others.
• Power distance is the degree to which people in a particular culture view the unequal distribution of power as acceptable.
  • In high-power-distance cultures, it is considered normal for people of different social and professional status to have greater power; accordingly, those with less status are expected to be deferential.
  • In low-power-distance cultures, those with higher status try to minimize the differences between themselves and persons with lower status—for example, by soliciting input and/or speaking informally.
  • Power distance affects how people deal with conflict and influences how they communicate in close relationships, especially in families. For example, in the high-power-distance culture of Mexico, young people are expected to respect the authority of elders.
• Masculine cultures, such as Austria and Italy, place importance upon personal ambition, competition, assertiveness, and material gain. Conversely, feminine cultures, such as Norway and Sweden, emphasize personal connections to others, relationship health, quality of life, and concern for the poor and elderly.
  • The United States and Canada are both considered moderately masculine.
• Not all cultures view time similarly.
  • M-time refers to the monochronic time orientation view, which perceives time as a precious resource. A person with M-time orientation would arrive for an appointment on time and insist on leaving when the beginning of another appointment was imminent.
  • P-time refers to the polychronic time orientation view, which perceives time as being less important than harmonious interaction. A person with P-time orientation might arrive late to an appointment and stay beyond the allotted period if the interaction was pleasurable.
  • Integrating views of time into your communication competence requires acknowledgement of different views and a willingness to adapt when interacting with persons who have different views of time than you.

• World-mindedness involves demonstrating acceptance and respect toward other cultures’ beliefs, values, and customs via three practices: (1) accepting others’ cultural expressions as a natural element of their interpersonal communication, (2) avoiding the temptation to judge others’ cultural traits as “better” or “worse” than your own, and (3) treating people from all cultures with respect.
  • The opposite of world-mindedness is ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s own cultural traits are superior to others’ cultural traits.

  Attributional complexity involves acknowledging that other people’s behaviors have complex causes. Developing this ability requires observation, analysis, and perception-checking to avoid attributional errors. For example, instead expressing shock at a cultural trait, ask about the reasons behind the trait so you can deepen your understanding.

• According to Communication Accommodation Theory, people are especially motivated to adapt their communication when they seek social approval, when they wish to establish relationships with others, and when they view others’ language usage as appropriate.