An introduction to Intercultural Communication (ICC)
by Erik Hemming, Lecturer in Languages at the Åland Polytechnic in Mariehamn, Finland.
Definitions, clarifications and simplifications
Worldview and values
The iceberg simile of culture and communication (appendix 1) can be seen as worldviews
under the surface and the physical world above. Our worldview is mainly learned in our early
years and remains subconscious to most people. It is very often mistaken for reality. This
mistake leads to enormous problems, but in spite of this very few realise that part of the
problem always lies in the way “reality” is perceived. Instead the problems induced by the
worldview are included in it and projected away from the subject.
Our internal world is a wonderful and very complex one. Since our nervous system has 300
billion neurons, each of them with some 5 thousand synapses, there is plenty of capacity to
take in and process information from the physical world and from the surrounding people’s
ways of understanding it.
One crucial feature of our worldview is that it is built up of information that we have selected
among an almost infinite mass of sensory input. Our subjectivity is our guiding principle in that
selection; we even call it our identity. And without interest, intentions, and emotions, there would
be no attention to anything outside of us.
The beliefs that we hold as truths are there because they are linked to our interest, intentions,
and emotions. This is how our internal world is built up and held together. To ourselves it seems
to be a logical world without contradictions. Like electrically charged particles, the pieces of
information we process, are turned so that the positive and the negative sides stay in balance.
And the forces that keep them in place are strong. Attitudes are hard to change. They seem to
us to be based on hard facts.
But the facts that we know are always connected to feelings. And feelings are always positive
or negative, never neutral. Therefore the facts are organised in value systems. These systems
are extremely complicated and multifaceted. They will be discussed here in terms of
dimensions in order to make tem possible to grasp. The following short list is included here in
order to show how rich a worldview is:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Approaches to problem solving
Arrangement of physical space
Attitudes
Attitudes to the dependent
Body language
Conception of beauty
Conception of cleanliness
Conception of justice
Conception of past and future
Conception of self
Conception of
status mobility
12.
Conversational
patterns in various social
contexts
13.
Cosmology
14.
Courtship practices
15.
Definition of
insanity
16.
17.
18.
19.
Definition of sin
Eye behaviour
Facial expressions
Ideals governing
child raising
20.
21.
Incentives to work
Informal
relationships
22.
23.
Loyalties
Management
styles
24.
Motivations and
commitments
25.
Nature of
friendship
26.
Norms
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27.
Notions of
adolescence
28.
Notions of
leadership
29.
36.
37.
38.
39.
Notions of logic
and validity
30.
31.
32.
Notions of modesty
Ordering of time
Patterns of group
decision-making
33.
Patterns of
handling emotions
34.
Patterns of
superior/subordinate relations
35.
Patterns of visual
perception
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
Perceived rewards
Personal aspirations
Power networks
Preference for competition
or cooperation
Relationships to animals
Roles in relation to status
by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship,
etc.
Rules of descent
Social interaction rate
Tempo of work
Theory of disease
Values
Colliding values give rise to clashes of culture. What is right for you is wrong for me. But
differences in communication codes can also be the problem, even if our values are
harmonising. The codes are also a part of our culture. In our worldview the connections
between our words and behaviour and what they mean is crystal clear.
Codes and signs
For communication to be efficient it needs to take place in a well-functioning group or society.
This is different than a category of people. Some categories of people, such as, say medical
doctors may understand each other better than say 38-year-old people do, but only people who
stay in communication with each other for a long time learn to decode each other’s messages
really well. Indeed they develop a code system of their own in such a group. The family is the
best example of such a group. As for societies they are in communication in an impersonal yet
constant way through their institutions. Note that there are countries where there is no common
society in which all people are included, nor want to be included (due to the power distribution).
A code is a rule that says that this sign or combination of signs represent this meaning. Based
on good knowledge of what signs usually stand for we can learn to guess quite well what new,
creative, combinations are intended to mean.
But signs are produced whether there is an intention to do so or not. Quite frequently meanings
are decoded without any person outside the receiver of the message being aware of any
message being transmitted. Our nervous system is fully capable of producing what it sees fit to
explain something that seems to need to be explained. That process goes backwards in time,
looking for a cause to a perceived effect. Objectively this is wrong, but it may feel right at the
time.
One example of rationalisation when it works well is when a person burns her hand. She then
retracts her hand in 0.1 second. But it takes 0.5 second to become aware of that, and even
longer to figure out the reason she pulled the hand back.
Part of the problem is that the amount of sensory input to our nervous system is so massive.
Some 11 – 12 million bits of information is received per second. About 10 million is visual, 1
million is auditive and the rest represents taste, touch, smell, and input from the muscle sense.
However, almost all of that is filtered out from our awareness. Only some 40 bits per second
may be held aware. And the filtering is completely subconscious. So on what data is our
worldview built? This is perhaps where the power of culture is most dramatically overwhelming.
Codes are the attachments of meanings of single or combined signs. A sign is then the
morpheme of communication, the smallest possible carrier of meaning. Close analysis of signs
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may show that they are not so single or simple. A wink of an eye may consist of many
components. But often it is enough to know that a person really did wink and then to guess
correctly what that could have meant in that situation.
To assign meaning to other people’s actions is called attribution. As a rule there are four
possibilities: Actions are explained by either a) personal traits, b) states of mind, c) the situation,
or d) culture. We tend to employ TRAIT far too often. Unfortunately this misconception then
often spills over to innocent members of the category to which we have assigned the person
whose actions we have “explained”. Instead the correct explanation more often is STATE,
SITUATION, or (most common of all) CULTURE.
Our subconsciously governed selection of sensory input greatly reinforces our tendency to
faulty attributions. If we feel strongly about something we are more likely to notice it, provided
there is an apt mental category at hand. There is a word for it: Stereotype. Added to this then
the presence of unresolved traumas in our personal or societal history will provide nutrition for
horrible prejudice of members of out-groups. This way worldviews and codes can lead people
towards segregation and even hate.
Dimensions of values
Simplifying diversity
As we saw from the list above the worldview of a person or a culture may simply not be
grasped without simplifications. Researchers and authors have contributed with many
suggestions to bring order in the confusion. One popular idea has been to group the
conceptions, notions, preferences, attitudes, beliefs, values, and norms that make up a
worldview along thematic lines. Such a line would then be organised from one extreme to its
very opposite, including great many possible standpoints in between. In the following a few of
these “dimensions” will be outlined briefly.
Power: Most importantly this is a question of parent-child relations. They are linked to the
presence of hierarchical structures in working life, school, and other areas of society. Groups
vary very much as to the members’ acceptance of a strong leader.
Individualism: With the advent of industrialism agriculture’s demand of collective efforts
vanished. As people leave their villages they gain freedom, but lose a whole world of social
meanings. This has not yet happened to most people on the earth. They might not wish to be
independent or to make their own decisions if they have to give up the we-feeling.
Masculinity: Cultures are soft or hard, nurturing or competitive, valuing either relations or money
and possessions. This is reflected to some extent in the right-left scale in politics.
Long-term orientation: A dimension emphasising the differences between the East and the
West. Do we pick harmony or truth if we have to choose? Do we work for ourselves or for our
grandchildren?
Universalism: The wish to apply the same rules to everybody, whereas particularism is to have
different rules for the in-group.
Task centredness: People prioritise performing tasks instead of taking care of their relations to
other people. This is often combined with a mono-chronic time conception, whereas people
centredness goes well with a poly-chronic conception of time. Modern, industrialised city life,
possibly also climate, influence societies in this dimension.
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Success in ICC
Us and them
Tribes living traditionally under scarce conditions have often had to fight for their livelihood. It
has been natural to prioritise one’s own in-group then if the resources have not been sufficient –
indeed even if they have been. Today we are not much different, except if people realise deep
inside that there are great benefits for both parties if they start to cooperate and learn from each
other. The cause of this new interdependence is globalisation.
However, it seems to almost genetically inevitable that people will think in terms of Us and
Them. By taking a look at how this works it may be possible for some to attain some level of
awareness of their own tendencies to exalt their own culture (group or society) and to
depreciate other peoples’ culture. But it is also true that many people feel attracted to other
cultures – and even to exaggerate their positive qualities, perhaps out of boredom with their
own society.
If groups meet or at least notice each other, communication is more difficult to set up than
between individuals, and much easier to spoil. Wars start that way. The responsibility is much
with the leaders who have a choice between demonising or humanising the other group in their
rhetoric. In-group dynamics often makes demonising easier.
In order to open up communication there needs to be – communication. The code systems
must merge to a certain point. Somebody must want to overcome the confidence gap, and to
believe it can be overcome. Traditionally, starting communication has taken place in rites, such
as sitting down around a fire, or eating or drinking something together. Neighbours may borrow
a cup of sugar to start the process.
If a misunderstanding takes place at this early stage, normally communication is interrupted.
Group members explain this with ideas of the other party’s faults, on both sides. But sometimes
people do go on spending time with the “others”, just like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.
In the course of a lot of time, close and multi-sensory communication will have taught people so
much about each other that they seldom misunderstand the “others” – in fact, they have
become “us”.
Ethnorelativism or cultural relativism
Of course it is easier to just communicate with those who are very much like us. “Birds of a
feather flock together.” If we talk to somebody and hear that person react just like we would to a
film or book or political situation it is easy to think of her as a friend. Probably we have an
unsatisfied need for confirmation of our worldview.
As we encounter and spend time with people from many different backgrounds and parts of the
world with an open mind, we change as persons. This is the same as to say that our worldview
changes. New categories are formed and old ones are split up into thousands. Nothing we
once believed in holds true forever and we often go through crises in our value systems.
Does this mean that everything is OK just because there are people who think so somewhere
in this world? That question has better not be answered – not by outsiders. Take the mothersin-law in India who have burnt their daughters-in-law. There is a special prison department for
them in Delhi. One should surely condemn the behaviour, but we will never be in a situation
where we can condemn them. Now, this is easy to write or say, but hard to live by.
We are in a perfectly good position to judge activities inside our own culture, but we have to
remember that activities performed by people in other cultures actually do make sense to them.
There simply is no objective ethical standard. I myself find that hard to live with.
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Appendix 1
Icebergs colliding under the surface
The physical world
OUTER REALITY
COMMUNICATION
CODES: Interpretation - negotiation
Worldview
INNER
REALITY
Worldview
INNER
REALITY
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