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Papers: A Framework for Understanding Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings

Most cross-cultural communication research focuses on communication or communication competence and does not mention cross-cultural miscommunication. In this research proposal I will endeavor to create a systematic framework for understanding cross cultural misunderstandings. I will examine various kinds of communication and various contexts in order to address two major issues, one mainly logical and the other mainly empirical- The first issue is: what are they kinds of cross-cultural misunderstandings that can occur, how do they relate to one another, and can they be classified into larger categories of misunderstanding. The second issue is: what cultures are likely to have what kinds of general and specific misunderstandings when they interact.

Cross-Cultural Communication Breakdowns

Definition

To date no consensus has emerged as to what constitutes a cross-cultural communication breakdown. Hewstone and Giles (1986) claimed that the concept of communication breakdown is:

Highly amorphous. The construct is implicitly static, overinclusive, and glosses over a heterogeneous range of objective and subjective ineffectualities of communication. We are in dire need of an adequate operational definition of 'breakdown', a consistent set of miscommunication nomenclatures, and a working typology of intergroup communication difficulties. (p. 22)

In this paper, I will explore the various ways that cross-cultural communication breakdowns have been described and explained, and suggest research that could potentially clarify and illuminate the construct.

Requisites for successful communication:

Successful communication between human beings, either within a culture or between cultures, requires that the message and meaning intended by the speaker is correctly received and interpreted by the listener. Sustainable error free communication is rare, and in most human interactions there is some degree of miscommunication.

The message sent from speaker to listener contains a wide array of features, such as words, grammar, syntax, idioms, tone of voice, emphasis, speed, emotion, and body language, and the interpretation requires the listener to attend to all of these features, while at the same time constructing an understanding of the speaker's intentions, emotions, politeness, seriousness, character, beliefs, priorities, motivations, and style of communicating. In addition, the listener must also evaluate whether the utterance is a question or a statement and how and to what extent a statement matters to the speaker. (Maltz and Borker, 1982)

Each of the components of the communication provides one or more kind of information. Words convey abstract logic, tone of voice conveys attitudes, emotions and emphases, and body language communicates "requests versus commands, the stages of greeting, and turn-taking". (Schneller 1988, p. 154)

Even assuming that words and bodily language were perfectly understood, there is more information necessary to successfully communicate across cultures. For example, in some countries it is polite to refuse the first few offers of refreshment: "Many foreign guests have gone hungry because their U.S. host or hostess never presented a third offer." (Samovar and Porter 1988, p. 326) In understanding communication, a listener must pay attention not just to what is said and when, but also to how many times something is said, under what circumstances, and by whom.

Given all this complexity, the reason human communication can often succeed is because people learn how to communicate and understand through interacting with one another throughout their lives. Therefore, it is no surprise that culture and socialization are critical determinants of communication and interpretation. "The entire inference process, from observation through categorization is a function of one's socialization". Detweiler (1975) Socialization influences how input will be received, and how perceptions will be organized conceptually and associated with memories.

The importance of culture to communication

Some theorists have gone so far as to claim that culture not only influences interpretation, but constitutes interpretation:

The interpretation of communicative intent is not predictable on the basis of referential meaning alone. Matters of context, social presuppositions, knowledge of the world, and individual background all play an important role in interpretation. (Gumperz, 1978b)

Even knowledgeable translators can have difficulty with cross cultural translations. There may not be corresponding words or equivalent concepts in both cultures, jokes and implications may be overlooked, and literal translations can present a host of difficulties. Some language pairs are very difficult to translate, while other, usually more similar languages, are much easier. (Sechrest, Fay and Zaidi 1988)

While some of the incremental difficulties can be traced to the underlying linguistic commonalities between the languages, there may be a more elusive cultural and ecological basis for difficulty in translation. It would be interesting to test how much of the variance in communication could be accounted for by the ease with which the languages in question could be translated into one another.

Although it may facilitate translation, similarity of languages and cultures also increases the likelihood that communicators will erroneously assume similarity of meanings. This may make them more likely to misunderstand speech and behavior without being aware that they may have misinterpreted the speaker's message.

In general, cross-cultural miscommunication can be thought to derive from the mistaken belief that emics are etics, that words and deeds mean the same thing across cultures, and this miscalculation is perhaps more likely when cultures are similar in surface attributes but different in important underlying ways. In this case miscommunication may occur instead of non-communication.

Data in cross-cultural communication

Communication can be thought of as both a bottom up and a top-down process, as guided by both data and theory in a manner analogous to other kinds of perceptions. Various researchers have focused on occasions when cross-cultural communication breaks down, and some researchers have focused on the faulty transmission or reception of the "data" of verbal and nonverbal language, while others have focused on the faulty construction of "theory" on the part of the communicators.

To some extent, perceptions and conceptions are inextricable. It is necessary to have information in order to create a theory, yet some theory is also a precondition of organizing the components of a communication into information. Gumperz (1977) wrote:

We are faced with a paradox. To decide on an interpretation, participants must first make a preliminary interpretation. That is, they listen to speech, form a hypothesis about what routine is being enacted, and then rely on social background knowledge and on co-occurrence expectations to evaluate what is intended and what attitudes are conveyed. (p. 205)

While this paradox exists in all human interactions, a common set of cultural communication tools, experiences and underlying assumptions can ease and facilitate this complicated process of theory building, testing, evaluation and modification. Perhaps cultures can even be thought of as collective symbolic and social systems that evolved partly for the purpose of facilitating communication while minimizing misunderstandings.

There is disagreement in the field as to whether cross-cultural miscommunication is different in degree or kind from intra-cultural misunderstanding. Kim (1986) believes that interpersonal and intergroup communication exist on a continuum, while others feel that there is actually a dichotomy between them. From this perspective, cross-cultural miscommunication is merely a subset of human miscommunication, its only distinction being the frequency with which it occurs as compared to intra-cultural misunderstandings. The contrary view is that cross-cultural miscommunication must have its own paradigm because it is qualitatively different from within-culture misunderstanding. Gumperz and Tannen (1979) believed that interpersonal and intergroup communication differ in kind, not just in degree, and there are implications for the comparison of same-cultures versus different-culture communication problems.

It is worthy of note that Tannen subsequently studied the communication difficulties faced when men and women interact. Some researchers have claimed that insofar as men and women are socialized differently, their miscommunication can be thought of as cross-cultural, even within the framework of a common cultural milieu. (Maltz & Borker, 1982).

This view seems to undermine Gumperz and Tannen's distinction between intra-group and inter-group communication. If differing socialization leads to different cultures for men and women, it seems that one could argue that any differences in socialization could lead to different cultures.

This would mean that the interaction of neighbors who live on the same street in a culturally homogenous neighborhood could be classified as cross-cultural insofar as their socializations differed. In this case, the difference in kind of intra-cultural and inter-cultural miscommunication would not be useful if the only interactions that could be classified as intra-cultural occurred within nuclear families.

Theory in cross-cultural communication:

At a much higher level of abstraction than specific communication "data" is the "theory" of attributions of another's motives and intentions. Pettigrew (1979) extends the fundamental attribution error into the intergroup sphere, and labels it "the ultimate attribution error". The ultimate attribution error occurs when people attribute the reasons for one another's action on the basis of their group membership. In human communication, perceptions of the communications requires a conception of the speaker, and vice versa. To the extent that prejudices and stereotypes influence the conception of the speaker, it will impair the ability of the listener to accurately perceive communications.

The negative influence of prejudice and stereotypes:

Pettigrew cites Duncan (1976) who found that white undergraduates interpreted an ambiguous shove of a white person by a black person as hostile and dispositional while interpreting the same shove as an accident and therefore situational when a white shoved another white. In this case the same actions of outgroup members was interpreted differently and therefore perceived differently. In an intercultural encounter, behavior itself will be different and uncertainty higher, and this will result in an even greater reliance on stereotypic schemas and explanations.

Stereotypes also inhibit effective intergroup communication because they distort perceptions and lead to pre-selected interpretations. They short-circuit the reciprocal process of understanding the person and the message:

Stereotypes are stumbling blocks for communicators because they interfere with objective viewing of stimuli and the sensitive search for cues toward the other person's reality.(Samovar & Porter, 1988 p. 327)

It is unlikely that stereotypes will lead to a radical breakdown in communication. Instead, they lead to gradual downward spiral of miscommunication. Theorists emphasize that communication breakdown is a process, not "a sudden event frozen in time" (Hewstone & Giles, 1986, p. 21) and that stereotypes contribute to this process. The authors also see a paradoxical difficulty in that:

Outgroup stereotypes are likely to be used attributionally and functionally to explain away communicative difficulties thereby confirming suspicions regarding outgroup competence and integrity(p. 25)

Stereotypes are very resilient theories and hard to falsify. Pettigrew (1979) describes how people do not re-evaluate their stereotypes when they encounter an outgroup member that lacks a stereotypical characteristic, instead they label that person as "an exception" and "not like the others".

The fact that stereotypes and prejudicial judgments are self-confirming and self-perpetuating illustrates the paradox mentioned earlier: that perceptions influence the construction of theories while theories simultaneously inform perceptions.

In a cross-cultural situation in which the actions performed differ, the convergence of theories and perceptions will be difficult or unattainable and therefore communication difficulties will be exacerbated. There is also a catch 22 in that the general miscommunication cannot be resolved until specific miscommunications are resolved and vice-versa.

Other factors that influence communication

The additional cognitive and emotional load that cross-cultural communicators must bear leads to exhaustion, frustration, and anxiety which can make communication even more difficult. Since people tend to like people similar to themselves, negative affect might also play a role in inhibiting understanding between cultural groups. (Berger, 1986)

Individual Differences and Cross-Cultural Communication

The process of human communication is analogous to scientific theory building in another way- both processes require prediction and falsification. (Detweiler, 1975). According to Detweiler, category width, defined as a "measure of individual consistency in the breadth or range of perceptual categories" (p. 592) is an important factor in the theory construction of cross-cultural understanding.

Detweiler predicted and found that people with wider categories would be more flexible in their thinking and more open to understanding that different behaviors can have the same meanings and that the same behavior can have different meanings.

Detweiler's work ties back into the attribution research in that wide category width individuals are:

Capable of making indefinite attributions when a situation occurs in which, as in cultural dissimilarity, there is apparently insufficient information for attribution decisions. (p. 601)

In other words, it is better not to make any attribution than to make the wrong one. Category width may be analogous to uncertainty avoidance, with narrow categorizers being high in uncertainty avoidance. Detweiler wrote: The narrow CW individual seems to make attributions as if he knows a lot about the person of another culture, and appears to make attributions on the basis of the effects of the behavior as evaluated from his own cultural perspective. (p. 609)

While constructing inter-cultural communication is always a difficult process given different cultural paradigms and the attendant constraint on theory testing, it seems that individual communication competence can make a positive or negative contribution. This raises the question: what characteristics must an effective intercultural communicator have? Are cross-cultural communicators skilled with all other cultures, or only ones which they are familiar with?

Some researchers believe that knowledge of other cultures is not sufficient to avoid the pitfalls of miscommunication. Samovar and Porter (1988) write:

Until recently the method used to improve chances for successful intercultural communication was just to gather information about the customs of the other culture. Experts realize that information gained in this fashion is general, seldom sufficient, and may or may not be applicable to the specific situation and area that the traveler visits.(p. 325)

In other words, communicators must do more than memorize rules, they must learn to understand the gestalt of the other culture.

Cultural differences and cross-cultural communication

High versus low context

High and low context cultures were defined by Hall (1959) in the following way:

A high context communication or message is one in which most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. A low context communication is just the opposite. (p. 47)

The groundwork is laid for misunderstandings because of the different quantity and quality of communications in the different kinds of culture. Yousef (1978) described some misunderstandings that can occur when members of high context cultures interact with members of low context cultures. These misunderstandings stem from the fact that in low-context cultures communications are more overt and rule governed, while in high context cultures, communication is not as explicit. When high-context cultures communicate with low context cultures, both the form and content of the communications will be different. Perhaps a way to think of the distinction is that low context communicators focus on the figure, while high context communicators focus on the ground.

Attribution errors come up again in high versus low context cultural interaction. Gudykunst (1991) claimed that when people from a low context culture make attributions about people from a high context culture, they overestimate dispositions, while high context people will overestimate the influence of the situation on the individualist.

Yousef gives three vignettes of high context and low context culture clashes and concludes:

Breakdowns in communication occur because the individuals try to derive meaning from abstracted behavioral sets rather than from studying the structure of underlying patterns and their meaning in related behavioral sets in related contexts. ( p. 61)

In addition to a misunderstanding of the content of messages is a difference in directness between high and low context cultures, with low context cultures relying on directness and high context cultures exhibiting a more indirect communicative style.

Even attempts at mending damaged communication situations may suffer from the same factors that caused the problem in the first place. The low context person may ask the high context person too directly what is bothering him or her, and make the person even more uncomfortable. Or the high context person might ask prying questions to get a better idea of who their counterpart is. (Gudykunst, 1991).

Individualism and collectivism

Individualism and collectivism also might lead to culturally caused misinterpretations. Triandis (1994) defines individualists as people whose "unit of social analysis" is the individual, and who view themselves as independent while collectivists place primary importance on groups and see themselves as interdependent with others.

Guydkunst (1991) gives the example of "giving face" as an example of where specifically problems might arise between cultures that vary on this dimension. Since collectivists attend to the face of others and individualists attend to their own face, individualists might strike collectivists as aggressive and selfish and collectivists might appear meek and obsequious to individualists. While individualists value public debate and differences of opinion, collectivists might take argumentation as disrespect.

Possible directions for future research:

The above literature review provides a summary of the existing empirical and theoretical research and illustrates that no systematic taxonomy of cross-cultural misunderstandings has yet been created. Such a taxonomy would need to contain a theoretical classification of kinds of cross-cultural misunderstandings, as well as larger logically sound categorical system into which these misunderstandings could fit.

This taxonomy would also need to contain empirical measures of which culture pairs have which kinds of misunderstandings with one another. This information could be collected both through correlational field research in which subjects would be asked to describe the objective circumstances and their subjective interpretations of occasions on which miscommunication occurred. In the laboratory, people from different cultural pairs could be asked to communicate until some form of breakdown occurred.

Given the current lack of comprehensive theoretical and empirical classifications of cultures, it is understandable that no taxonomy of misunderstandings between the world's cultures has been developed.

Successful cross-cultural communication requires the reciprocal support, mutual falsifiability and co-evolution of data and theory. Therefore, the taxonomy of cross-cultural misunderstandings would ideally be the product of the reflexive modification of its theoretical and empirical components. Just as successful cross-cultural interaction requires the communicators to take one anothers perspective, so too the proposed taxonomy would need to be developed with the participation of researchers from several different cultures, each contributing his or her own perspective on inter-cultural miscommunications and how they relate to one another. Cross-cultural collaboration on this project could help create a cross-cultural understanding of cross-cultural misunderstanding.