Summary
This lesson has presented several cultural value dimensions that can help explain some major differences and similarities between values orientations of individuals from diverse cultures. We now present some recommended guidelines and skills to progress along the path to becoming more flexible intercultural communicators.
- Upon confronting a new culture or member of a new culture, learn to practice the mindful ODIS method, mindful observation, description, interpretations, and suspending ethnocentric evaluations.
- Learn to attentively observe the verbal and nonverbal signals being exchanged, and learn to avoid hasty negative evaluations. Skipping this step often leads to unconscious incompetence.
- After mindfully observing, try to describe specifically what is happening in the intercultural interaction. For example, "He is not making direct eye contact with me," or "She is standing six feet away from me while we are talking." Refrain from adding evaluative meaning to the observations.
- Generate multiple interpretations of the behavior that we are observing and then describing to try to make sense of it.
- Learn to observe a wide range of people within a wide range of situations in the new cultural setting before jumping to any premature generalizations about the culture or its people.
Our cultural values shape our identities on a group membership level. As we are willing to dig more deeply into our own cultural value laden lenses and understand our own socialization, we can better understand our tendency to form quick judgments of other peoples' "bizarre" ways of thinking and behaving. Because our cultural values so profoundly shape our identities, they also deeply influence the way in which we communicate with others. The cultural characteristics discussed in this chapter should illuminate some of the various underlying cultural values that shape our ways of thinking and therefore our communications.
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