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stereotypes if he is to be successful in reaching his goal. This film is useful for examining culture
shock, stereotypes, and the process of acculturation.
Web Resources
Humans of New York
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/
This website features interviews with thousands of people on the streets of New York City.
These stories focus on humans from all different walks of life, and capture the human experience
through the unique stories of people and the challenges they face.
A Conversation with White People on Race
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/opinion/a-conversation-with-white-people-on-
race.html?mcubz=3
This short documentary film features white people talking about what race means to them and
the challenges they face, as white people, talking about race.
25 Mini-Films for Exploring Race, Bias, and Identity with Students
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/learning/lesson-plans/25-mini-films-for-exploring-race-
bias-and-identity-with-students.html
This website features multiple short documentary films about race, stereotypes, racism, and more
from the perspective of multiple cultural groups. The film explores race from the perspective of
Asian Americans, African Americans, Whites, Native Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and more.
Culturally Speaking: Individualism-Collectivism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uFa0hBPqOY&list=PLBC30DF069745E20C
This four-minute video uses narration and a series of photos to explain the concepts of
individualism and collectivism in different cultures.
Low- and High-Context Cultures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIUilYX56E&list=PLBC30DF069745E20C
This four-minute video uses narration and a series of photos to explain low- and high-context
cultures and how each affects communication. The narrator discusses anthropologist Edward T.
Hall’s ideas about high-context and low-context messages.
Countries and Their Cultures
http://www.everyculture.com/
This site features a comprehensive listing of world cultures, with links to articles about each. The
“Multicultural America” section offers a collection of articles about numerous co-cultures within
the United States.
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Geert Hofstede Cultural Dimensions
http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/
This site provides links to world maps that illustrate the cultural dimensions of different nations,
including power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term
orientation.
Cultural Survival Quarterly
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly
Cultural Survival is an organization focused on publicizing indigenous people’s issues
throughout the world. Articles from the most recent issue are available online, along with an
archive of articles from previous editions.
Protecting Our Heritage and Fostering Creativity
http://en.unesco.org/themes/protecting-our-heritage-and-fostering-creativity
This site, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), features news and articles related to the preservation and protection of cultures
throughout the world.
What is Culture?
http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_1.htm
This web page features a discussion of the meaning of culture, including the layers of culture, the
universal elements of culture, and how a culture differs from a society.
Mosaic: Voices of Community
http://www.mosaicvoices.org/
Mosaic is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural alliances, creative
mentoring relationships, and educational projects. Among the resources are essays, interviews,
and a blog (available under the “Media” tab), and links to information about ongoing projects,
including Voices of Veterans, Voices of Youth, Mentoring, Myth & Culture, and Ecstatic Voices.
Cultural Policy Database
http://www.culturelink.org/culpol/
This website features a collection of profiles outlining the cultural policies of a number of
nations in Europe, North America, and Asia, along with a link to the Observatory of Cultural
Policies in Africa (OCPA) website.
How to Bow in Japan
http://gojapan.about.com/cs/etiquetteinjapan/a/bowing.htm
This site explains the various functions of bowing in Japanese culture, and describes the different
types of bows and when they are appropriate.
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A Guide to Finnish Customs and Manners
http://finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=160036&contentlan=2&culture=en-US
This article addresses common cultural customs and manners in Finland, including those related
to identity, religion, gender, conversing, information technology, languages, names and titles,
greeting, eating, drinking, tipping, and smoking.
Understanding Prejudice
http://www.understandingprejudice.org/
This site features a variety of interactive exercises regarding prejudice, stereotyping, and
discrimination, along with over 2,000 links to prejudice-related resources.
Beyond Prejudice
http://www.beyondprejudice.com/
This site examines the issue of prejudicial behavior and discusses reducing prejudicial behavior,
the impacts of prejudicial behavior, assessing your knowledge of prejudices, and assessing your
own prejudices.
101 Ways to Combat Prejudice
http://archive.adl.org/prejudice/default.html
This downloadable pamphlet, sponsored by Barnes & Noble and the Anti-Defamation League,
provides 101 practical suggestions for combating prejudice in schools.
“Stereotypes”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASDzcvyatgw
This 20/20 news segment focuses on research that demonstrates how our stereotypes have the
potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
“Racist Advertisements and Commercials”
http://www.adsavvy.org/25-most-racist-advertisements-and-commercials/
At this site, you can find a list of examples of racist advertisements and commercials. The site
can be useful for class discussions about how the media perpetuates stereotypes.
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MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS
The following music examples have been included for illustrating interpersonal communication
concepts addressed in this chapter. It is recommended that the instructor preview songs before
using them, as some contain adult language. Each instructor must decide what is appropriate for
his or her class.
“Same Love,” performed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
“Where Is the Love?” performed by The Black Eyed Peas
“One Love,” performed by Bob Marley
“Imagine,” performed by John Lennon
“Black or White,” performed by Michael Jackson
“Brown Girl,” performed by Aradhna
“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” performed by Mandy Patinkin
“Different People,” performed by No Doubt
“People are People,” performed by Depeche Mode
“The Beauty of Gray,” performed by Live
“Free Your Mind,” performed by En Vogue
“Your Racist Friend,” performed by They Might Be Giants
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Chapter 5: Understanding Culture
Lecture Outline
I. What is culture?
2016.
B. The population of international students is also on the rise, with more than 1 million
international students enrolling in U.S. colleges annually.
C. Technology also enables us to conduct business and personal relationships on a global
level in a way never possible before.
II. Culture Defined
A. Culture is an established, coherent set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices
shared by a large group of people. Culture includes many types of influences, such as
nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical and mental
abilities, and even age.
B. What makes a culture feel like a “culture” is that it’s widely shared; this happens
because cultures are:
1. Learned. You learn your cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values from many sources,
including your parents, teachers, religious leaders, peers, and the mass media.
This process begins at birth, and as you mature, you learn deeper aspects of your
culture, including the history behind certain traditions.
2. Communicated. Each culture has its own practices regarding how to
communicate. Communicating with someone from a different culture is called
intercultural communication.
3. Layered. Many people belong to more than one culture simultaneously. This
means they experience multiple “layers” of culture, as various traditions,
heritages, and practices are recognized and held as important.
4. Lived. Culture affects everything about how you live your life, from the
neighborhood where you live, the transportation you use, and even the way you
think, dress, talk, and eat. Its impact runs so deep that it is often taken for granted.
Culture is often a great source of personal pride, and a powerful tool for self-
expression.
III. Co-cultures
A. In any society, there’s usually a group of people who have more power than others—
the ability to influence or control people and events.
B. Co-cultural Communication Theory asserts that the people who have more power
within a society determine the dominant culture, because they get to decide the
prevailing views, values, and traditions of the society.
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C. Co-cultures are formed by members of a society who don’t conform to the dominant
culture by way of language, values, life style, or even physical appearance. They have
their own cultures that co-exist within a dominant cultural sphere.
1. Co-cultures may be based on age, gender, social class, ethnicity, religion, mental
and physical ability, sexual orientation, and other elements that unify people who
occupy less powerful positions within a society.
2. Co-cultures exist as distinct co-cultures and often have their own lobbying groups,
magazines, websites, and so on.
D. Co-cultural communication occurs when underrepresented groups interact with
people from the dominant group.
E. Co-cultures develop and use numerous communication practices that help them
interact with people in the culturally dominant group.
F. Examples of communication practices or patterns a co-culture might use include:
2. Using accommodation— behaving in ways that authentically represent their co-
culture in an attempt to gain acceptance from the dominant culture.
3. Practicing separation— distancing themselves from the dominant culture through
blatant challenges of the dominant culture’s legitimacy or through isolating
themselves socially and interpersonally from the dominant group.
G. We classify those who are similar to us as ingroupers and those who are different as
outgroupers.
1. If you assign people as ingroupers or outgroupers based on surface-level
differences, you may mistakenly perceive that you don’t share anything in
common and miss important similarities.
2. We view ourselves and others through multiple and varied lenses, which together
form a prism of perception, which varies according to who we are communicating
with, the topic being discussed, and the desired outcomes of the interaction.
3. Intersectionality suggests that each of us is a complex combination of cultural
and co-cultural identities and experiences, and each of us speaks and perceives
from a specific junction where all of these influences meet.
IV. Technology and Culture
A. Research indicates that a cultural divide does exist with regard to social media use.
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A. Scholars suggest that seven dimensions underlie cultural differences in our
interpersonal communication:
1. Individualism versus Collectivism
a. In individualistic cultures, people tend to:
a. Value independence and personal achievement
b. Focus on themselves and their immediate family
c. Praise individual achievement as the highest good
d. Examples of individualist countries include the United States, Canada,
New Zealand, and Sweden
b. In collectivistic cultures people tend to:
i. Emphasize group identity
ii. Emphasize interpersonal harmony and the well-being of ingroups
iii. Emphasize the goals, needs, and views of groups over those of individuals
iv. Define cooperation with others rather than individual achievement as the
highest good
v. Examples of collectivist countries include Guatemala, Pakistan, Taiwan,
and Japan
c. Differences between individualistic and collectivistic cultures can powerfully
influence people’s behaviors, including which social networking sites they use
and how they use them.
2. Uncertainty Avoidance
a. Uncertainty avoidance addresses how cultures vary in how much they
tolerate and accept unpredictability.
b. High-uncertainty-avoidance cultures place a lot of value on control, define
rigid rules and conventions to guide all beliefs and behaviors, and feel
uncomfortable with unusual or innovative ideas.
i. People want structure in their organizations, institutions, relationships, and
everyday lives.
ii. Examples of high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures include Mexico, South
Korea, Japan, and Greece.
iii. People tend to commit to organizations for long periods of time, expect
their job responsibilities to be clearly defined, and strongly believe that
organizational rules should not be broken.
c. Low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures place more emphasis on letting the
future happen without trying to control it.
i. People care less about rules, tolerate diverse viewpoints and beliefs, and
welcome innovation and change.
ii. People feel free to question and challenge authority.
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iii. The United States and Canada are considered moderately uncertainty-
avoidant and Jamaica, Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland are considered to be
low-uncertainty-avoidant.
3. Power Distance
a. Power distance is the degree to which people in a particular culture view
the unequal distribution of power as acceptable.
b. In high-power-distance cultures, people of different social and professional
status have different levels of power and give privileged treatment and
extreme respect to those in high-status positions.
i. Individuals of lesser status are expected to behave humbly, especially
around people of higher status, who are expected to act superior.
c. In low-power-distance cultures, people in high-status positions try to
minimize the differences between themselves and lower-status persons.
i. People of higher status interact with people of lower status in informal
ways and treat them as equals.
ii. People with less power may choose to engage in conflict with high-power
people.
d. Power distance also influences how people communicate in close
relationships
i. In Mexican culture, the value of respeto (respect) emphasizes power
distance between younger people and their elders, and children are
expected to defer to elders’ authority.
ii. In Euro-American cultures, it is often believed that once children reach
adulthood, power in family relationships should be balanced.
4. High- and Low-Context
a. High-context cultures use relatively vague and ambiguous language, and
even silence, to convey important meanings.
i. People often talk indirectly (using hints or suggestions) because they
presume that members of their ingroup will know what they’re trying to
say.
ii. People don’t feel a need to provide a lot of explicit information.
iii. Examples of high-context cultures include China, Korea, and Japan.
b. Low-context cultures tend not to presume that others share their beliefs,
attitudes, and values.
i. People strive to be informative, clear, and direct in their communication.
ii. People work to make important information obvious, rather than hinting or
implying.
iii. People openly express their views and try to persuade others to accept
them.
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iv. Examples of low-context cultures include Germany, Scandinavia, Canada,
and the United States and are often considered as individualist cultures.
5. Emotion Displays
a. Display rules are the cultural norms that exist regarding how people should
and shouldn’t express emotion. They provide guidelines for when, where, and
how to manage emotion displays appropriately.
b. Display rules vary across cultures; when families immigrate to a new society,
tensions often exist over which display rules to follow.
6. Masculinity versus Femininity
a. Masculine cultural values include accumulation of wealth, assertiveness,
personal achievement, and competition.
i. Examples of masculine cultures include Japan, Hungary, Venezuela,
Austria, and the United States, whereas Canada is moderately masculine.
b. Feminine cultural values emphasize compassion, cooperation, and caring
for the weak and underprivileged.
• Examples of feminine cultures include Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands,
and Denmark.
7. Views of Time
a. People with a monochronic time (M-time) orientation view time as a
precious resource that can be saved, spent, wasted, lost, or made up, and it can
even run out.
b. People with a polychronic time (P-time) orientation are flexible when it
comes to time, and believe that harmonious interaction is more important than
“being on time” or sticking to a schedule.
c. Differences in time orientation can create problems when people from
different cultures make appointments with each other, but you can improve
your intercultural competence by:
i. Understanding other people’s views of time
ii. Learning about the time orientation prior to traveling abroad
iii. Respecting others’ time orientation
iv. Avoiding criticizing or complaining about behaviors that stem from other
people’s time orientations
v. Accepting the fact that people view time differently and be willing to
adapt your own expectations and behaviors accordingly
VI. Creating Intercultural Competence
A. Intercultural competence is the ability to communicate appropriately, effectively,
and ethically with people from diverse backgrounds.
B. You can strengthen your intercultural competence by applying world-mindedness,
attributional complexity, and communication accommodation.
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C. World-mindedness is your ability to demonstrate acceptance and respect toward
other cultures’ beliefs, values, and customs.
1. You can practice world-mindedness in three ways:
a. Accept others’ expression of their culture or co-culture as a natural element
in their communication, just as your communication reflects your culture.
b. Avoid any temptation to judge others’ cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values as
“better” or “worse” than your own.
c. Treat people from all cultures with respect.
2. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own cultural beliefs, attitudes, values, and
practices are superior to others; it is the opposite of world-mindedness.
D. Attributional complexity is acknowledging that other people’s behaviors have
complex causes. You can develop this ability by:
1. Observing others’ behavior and analyzing the various forces influencing it.
2. You can also use perception-checking to avoid attributional errors, and
regularly demonstrate empathy.
3. Other strategies include examining how people from diverse backgrounds
make decisions, and asking about their behaviors and accepting their
explanations.
E. Communication accommodation is the process of adjusting your communication
to mesh with the behaviors of people from other cultures. Research suggests that
people who use communication accommodation are perceived as more competent.
1. Communication Accommodation Theory states that people are motivated to
adapt their communication when they seek social approval, wish to establish
relationships, and when they view others’ language usage as appropriate.
2. In contrast, people tend to accentuate differences between their communication
and others’ when they wish to convey emotional distance and disassociate
themselves from others.
3. To practice communication accommodation:
a. Try adapting to other people’s communication preferences.
b. Learn and practice cultural norms for nonverbal behaviors, such as eye contact
and handshakes.
c. Avoid imitating other people’s dialects, accents, or word choices.
VII. Making Relationship Choices: Parent-Child Culture Clash
A. Communicating across cultural boundaries can be challenging, especially when those
boundaries involve differences between children and their elders within the same family.
B. Imagine that you’re a first-generation American and your parents have deep ties to their
home culture and traditions, which vastly differ from the American values you’ve grown
accustom to. Your mother seems to be more controlling than ever in terms of what she
expects of you regarding your family obligations and your future career. You are feeling
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resentment that her ideas for you do not match with your new interests since going away
to college.
C. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings as well as those of your mother.
D. Determine the optimal outcome and locate the roadblocks to achieving the outcome.
E. Use the concepts of culture, individualism versus collectivism, power distance, display
rules, attributional complexity, and communication accommodation to plan a course of
action.