The term “culture” refers to the complex accumulation of knowledge, folklore, language, rules, rituals, habits, lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs, and customs that link and provide a general identity to a group of people. Cultures take a long time to develop. There are many things that establish identity give meaning to life, define what one becomes, and how one should behave.
Distribution and exercise of power shape attitudes towards authority. How people sustain themselves economically, and how they manage to obtain the necessities of life, determines assigned roles of individuals and the relationships among them.
Physical surroundings of people help define the nature, intensity, and longevity of their values. A wealth of resources or mild climate creates a sense of well-being and optimism. In contrast rugged terrain, harsh weather, frequent disaster, and a lack of resources can create cynicism, fear of nature, and a need for interdependency to ensure mutual survival. To a degree we can connect favorable conditions with a higher standard of living and more competitive and detail oriented values.
How do personal values shape culture, and how does culture affect our understanding and interpretation of seemingly ordinary things?
Core values influence actions, and we act in ways that we believe hold the most useful means of satisfying needs. Values influence behavior. They are why we do what we do, say what we do, and think as we do. How a society perceives personal values and norms can drastically change how things are interpreted and could be offensive to some. Meanings and connotations in many gestures and words are not the same universally.
Understanding through Communication
Many people think that underneath “we are ...
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Culture is a set of beliefs and patterns of behaviors that are shared by the members of a specific group. These values can be reinforced or expressed through stories, songs, art, and rituals. A language is an important tool for preserving culture.
Culture affects people’s ways of thinking and their views of the world. People face the challenge of developing an understanding of culture that both captures diverse backgrounds and shared systems of attitudes and feelings. Individuals of different cultures not only live different lifestyles but also have a unique and distinct way of thinking. Advocated to learn and appreciate numerous characteristics of everyone’s cultural background. From John David Morley’s short story, Acquiring a Japanese Family, he compares and contrasts how the Eastern and Western cultures embrace the different behaviors, lifestyles, and the qualities of living.
Whether we realize it or not, the way that we communicate with others has been a total of all that we have learned and the way that we perceive it. People's cultural upbringing conjures up different images, attitudes, and behaviors. Cultural beliefs, values, norms, and practices all influence communication. This analysis will describe examples of how culture’s can influence communication styles and patterns.
Culture is the unique way to act and think within a people from a certain place. It’s the way the people hold their beliefs, what they hold valuable, how they speak and even how they write. Culture is how people relate and act with one another within a certain space. Culture can vary from place to place such as city, state, country or continent.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary Culture id defined as »the way of life, especially the general belief and custom, of a particular group of people at a particular time.« (1) Culture also can be defined as the total body of tradition which born by a society and transmitted from one generation to another generation. It thus refers to the language, norms, symbols, values and standards by which people act. It is that complex whole which involves law, custom, morals, art, belief, knowledge and any other habits and capabilities which acquired by a member of society. According to the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition(CARLA), culture is illustrated as the shared pattern of interaction and behavior, affective understanding and cognitive construct which is learned through the socialization process.
How do human morals, ethics, and values influence social psychology? In other words, how do our personal interpretations influence how we think, feel and act in social settings? Personal interpretations influence everything that we do; how we think, act and feel in social settings. The word Schema is used to described the mindset that we use to organize our knowledge of the world around us. For instance, how we handle life’s shortcoming are based on our mindsets; if a person interprets every obstacle as a setback, it is likely that the person gives up and assumes every opportunity will ultimately lead to failure. Also, some cultural values might influence what a person looks for in a relationship; a man because of his cultural values might
Communication throughout the ages has changed greatly. In the past, all communication was done face to face or through written letters. Today, technology has evolved the way people can communicate. It is now possible to communicate with a person on the other side of the world. However, this ease of communication presents some challenges, mainly through difficulty in understanding the other person but also due to cultural differences. What one culture deems as acceptable, may not be true for the other. Other differences in culture also presents issues. However, these issues can be lessened or even eliminated through education and travel.
Understanding one’s own culture is an important aspect of cross-cultural and intercultural communication, by allowing people to adapt and relate to different cultures. Culture can be defined as, “…a learned meaning system that consists of patterns of traditions, beliefs, values, norms, meanings, and symbols that are passed on from one generation to the next and are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community” (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2012, pg. 16). Culture impacts how people communicate. Western countries, such as the United State and France, communicate differently than eastern countries, like China and Japan. High versus low context culture, and the iceberg metaphor of culture consisting of surface, intermediate and deep
Anthropologists define the term culture in a variety of ways, but there are certain shared features of the definition that virtually all anthropologists agree on. Culture is a shared, socially transmitted knowledge and behavior. The key features of this definition of culture are as follows. 1) Culture is shared among the members of that particular society or group. Thus, people share a common cultural identity, meaning that they recognize themselves and their culture's traditions as distinct from other people and other traditions. 2) Culture is socially transmitted from others while growing up in a certain environment, group, or society. The transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generation by means of social learning is referred to as enculturation or socialization. 3) Culture profoundly affects the knowledge, actions, and feelings of the people in that particular society or group. This concept is often referred to as cultural knowledge that leads to behavior that is meaningful to others and adaptive to the natural and social environment of that particular culture.
In this negotiation case, both parties have totally different cultural background. As culture might be defined as the scheme in which a person is socialized, it also means that culture influences the manner that people live, play, work and most importantly communicate with others. In order to understand and communicate effectively with people from different culture it is important to understand how culture affects communication. Culture can be conceptualized in many different ways but common conceptualization of culture focuses directly upon communication. This idea was advanced by Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist who spends years living among and observing people with many different cultures. In order to understand his idea it is important to understand the basic forms of communication: high context messages and low context messages. The messages can be placed along a continuum from low context to high context.
In The Silent Language, Edward Hall’s (1959) seminal examination of non-verbal communication, it is ambiguous asserted that “culture is communication and communication is culture,” (217). Though this statement is obviously lacks for broad explanatory power, Hall nevertheless aptly articulates the crucial roles that culture plays in communication research. From its role in theories of communication to its treatment as a both the independent and the dependent variable in experimental studies, culture shapes the nature of what communication researchers, and speaks to the very heart of what communication is. This literature review will first briefly mention the historical origins of culture in communication research, and identify what has become the primary area of quantitative communication research into culture: intercultural communication. Next, we will examine the definition of culture that intercultural communication researchers have adopted. Last, we will explore how this definition is applied through an exploration of the variables, levels of analysis, and other salient dimensions of communication.
What is culture? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving
Humans have been communicating since four million years. On the other hand, the birth of culture is estimated to have taken place about 35,000 years ago. Today, both culture and communication have evolved considerably and have become interdependent of one another, to the point that communication is considered to be a product of culture. Thus, our own culture has a deep impact on our thoughts and behaviors. Since each culture has its distinct aspects, intercultural communication can be the cause of conflict and disorder. There are three main issues which are at the root of the problem of intercultural miscommunication : language as a barrier, cultural diversity and ethnocentrism. I will analyze these three notions in situations in which intercultural communication is frequent such as : the workplace, the classroom and vacation trips.
Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine and social habits. It includes the groups we are born into, such as race, gender, class or religion as well as the groups we join or become a part of. It is a lifestyle of gathering individuals; the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they acknowledge, generally without contemplating them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is important because it allows people to remain unique in society. Many cultures have a lot in common but also differs greatly. All cultures differ immensely that someone in the same culture may disagree with the behaviors, beliefs and
Zion, S & Kozleski, E (eds.) 2005, Understanding Culture, National Institute for Urban School Improvement, Arizona. Available from: Arizona State University. [25 March 2014]