As you’ll recall from the communication competence model (Chapter 1), your encounters with others occur within overlapping situational, relational, and cultural contexts. Culture is a learned system of thought and behavior that belongs to and typifies a relatively large group of people; it is the composite of their shared beliefs, values, and practices. Although we might commonly think of culture as a person’s nationality, it applies to any broadly shared group identity. In this section, we investigate how culture is learned, how it affects our communication, and why learning how to communicate in different cultures is so important.