COMMUNICATION HAS A CONSEQUENCE

Inserted into our last principle was the idea that people can learn something from every
experience to which they are exposed. A corollary of this concept is the nucleus of our fi nal
principle: the act of sending and receiving symbols infl uences all the involved parties. Put in
slightly different terms, “All of our messages, to one degree or another, do something to
someone else (as well as to us).”69 West and Turner underscore this same point by noting, “The
process nature of communication also means that much can happen from the beginning of the
conversation to the end. People may end up at a very different place once the discussion
begins.”70 Your responses to messages vary in degree and kind. It might help you to try to
picture your potential responses in the form of a continuum. At one end of the continuum lie
responses to messages that are overt and easy to understand. Someone sends you a message by
asking directions to the library. Your response is to say, “It’s on your right.” You might even
point to the library. The message from the other person has thus produced an observable
response. A little farther across the continuum are those messages that produce only a mental
response. If someone says to you, “The United States doesn’t spend enough money on higher
education,” and you only think about this statement, you are still responding, but your response
is not an observable action.

As you proceed across the continuum, you come to responses that are harder to detect. These are
responses to messages you receive made by imitating, observing, or interacting with others.
Generally, you are not even aware that you are receiving these messages. Your parents act out
their gender roles, and you receive messages about your gender role. People greet you by
shaking hands instead of hugging, and, without being aware of it, you are receiving messages
about forms of address. At the far end of the continuum are responses to messages that are
received unconsciously. That is, your body responds even if your cognitive processes are kept to
a minimum. Messages that you receive can alter your hormonal secretions, your heart rate, or the
temperature of your skin; modify pupil size; and trigger a host of other internal responses. These
chemical and biological responses are not outwardly observable, and they are the most diffi cult
ones to classify. However, they give credence to our assertion that communication has a
consequence. If your internal reactions produce chaos in your system, as is the case with severe
stress, you can become ill. Regardless of the content of the message, it should be clear that the
act of communication produces change. The response you make to someone’s message does not
have to be immediate. You can respond minutes, days, or even years later. For example, your
second-grade teacher may have asked you to stop throwing rocks at a group of birds. Perhaps the
teacher added that the birds were part of a family and were gathering food for their babies. She
might also have indicated that birds feel pain just like people. Perhaps twenty years later, you are
invited to go quail hunting. You are about to say “yes” when you remember those words from
your teacher and decide not to go. One of the most important implications of this last principle is
the potential infl uence you can have over other people. Whether or not you want to grant those
consequences, you are changing people each time you exchange messages with them. Wood
buttresses this view when she writes, “What we say and do affects others: how they perceive
themselves, how they think about themselves, and how they think about others. Thus,
responsible people think carefully about ethical guidelines for communication.” We conclude
this section on communication by reminding you of a point that should be obvious by now:
communication is complex. We must add that it is even more complex when the cultural
dimensions are included. Although all cultures use symbols to share their realities, the specifi c
realities and the symbols employed are often quite different. In one culture, you smile in a casual
manner as a form of greeting, whereas in another you bow formally in silence, and in yet another
you acknowledge your friend with a full embrace. From our discussion, you should now have an
understanding of the concept of communication and the role it plays in everyday interaction.
With this background in mind, we now turn to the topic of culture.

CULTURE

Moving from communication to culture provides us with a rather seamless transition, for as Hall
points out, “Culture is communication and communication is culture.” Put into slightly different
words, when looking at communication and culture it is hard to decide which is the voice and
which is the echo. The reason for the duality is that you “learn” your culture via communication,
while at the same time communication is a refl ection of your culture. This book manifests the
authors’ strong belief that you cannot improve your intercultural communication skills without
having a clear understanding of this thing we call culture. The powerful link between
communication and culture can be seen in the following few questions:
• Some people in many parts of the world put dogs in their ovens, but people in the United States
put them on their couches and beds. Why?

• Some people in Kabul and Kandahar pray fi ve times each day while sitting on the fl oor, but
some people in Las Vegas sit up all night in front of video poker machines. Why?

• Some people speak Tagalog and others speak English. Why?

• Some people paint and decorate their entire bodies, but others spend hundreds of dollars
painting and decorating only their faces. Why? • Some people talk to God, but others have God
talk to them, and still others say there is no God. Why?

• Some people shake hands when introduced to a stranger, but other people bow at such an
encounter. Why?

The general answer to all of these questions is the same: culture. As Peoples and Bailey point
out, “cultures vary in their ways of thinking and ways of behaving.” As you may have noticed,
all of the questions we posed dealt with thinking and behaving. Rodriguez underlines the infl
uence of culture on human perception and actions when she writes, “Culture consists of how we
relate to other people, how we think, how we behave, and how we view the world.” Although
culture is not the only stimulus behind your behavior, its omnipresent quality makes it one of the
most powerful. As Hall concluded, “There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and
altered by culture.” What makes culture so unique is that you share your culture with other
people who have been exposed to similar experiences. While your personal experiences and
genetic heritage form the unique you, culture unites people with a collective frame of reference
that is the domain of a community, not a characteristic of a single person. As Hofstede points
out, “Culture is to a human collective what personality is to an individual.”76 Nolan reaffi rms
this idea when he suggests that culture is a group worldview, the way of organizing the world
that a particular society has created over time.

This framework or web of meaning allows the members of that society to make sense of
themselves, their world, and their experiences in that world. It is this sharing of a common reality
that gives people within a particular culture a common fund of knowledge. Chiu and Hong offer
an excellent summary of some of the activities and perceptions that grow out of a shared way of
experiencing the world: Shared knowledge gives rise to shared meanings, which are carried in
the shared physical environment (such as the spatial layout of a rural village, subsistence
economy) social institutions (e.g., schools, family, the workplace), social practices (e.g., division
of labor) the language, conversation scripts, and other media (e.g., religious scriptures, cultural
icons, folklores, idioms).

Inherent in our discussion of culture is the idea that culture helps people make sense of the
world. Remember that although you are born with all the anatomy and physiology needed to live
in the world, you are not born into a world that has meaning for you. You do not arrive in this
world knowing how to dress, what toys to play with, what to eat, which gods to worship, what to
strive for, or how to spend your money and your time. Culture is both teacher and textbook.
From how much eye contact you employ in conversations to why you believe you get sick,
culture plays a dominant role in your life. As we have noted, this book is about how different
cultures produce different lives. And when cultures differ, communication practices also differ.
As Smith pointed out: In modern society different people communicate in different ways, as do
people in different societies around the world; and the way people communicate is the way they
live. It is their culture. Who talks with whom? How? And about what? These are questions of
communication and culture. A Japanese geisha and a New England librarian send and receive
different messages on different channels and in different networks. When the elements of
communication differ or change, the elements of culture differ or change. Communication and
culture are inseparable. We have tried to convince you that culture is a powerful force in how
you see the world and interact in that world. To further that indoctrination, let us now

(1) defi ne culture,

(2) explain the basic functions of culture,

(3) highlight the essential elements of culture, and

(4) discuss the major characteristics of culture.

Defining Culture

The preceding discussion on the topic of culture should enable you to see that culture is
ubiquitous, complex, all pervasive, and—most of all—diffi cult to defi ne. As Harrison and
Huntington note, “The term ‘culture,’ of course, has had multiple meanings in different
disciplines and different contexts.”80 The elusive nature of the term is perhaps best refl ected in
the fact that as early as 1952 a review of the anthropology literature revealed 164 different defi
nitions of the word culture. As Lonner and Malpass point out, these defi nitions “range from
complex and fancy defi nitions to simple ones such as ‘culture is the programming of the mind’
or ‘culture is the human-made part of the environment.’ ”

The media also uses the word to portray aspects of individual sophistication such as classical
music, fi ne art, or exceptional food and wine. This, of course, is not the way we plan to use the
word. For our purposes, we are concerned with a defi nition that contains the recurring theme of
how culture and communication are linked. One defi nition that meets our needs is advanced by
Triandis: Culture is a set of human-made objective and subjective elements that in the past have
increased the probability of survival and resulted in satisfaction for the participants in an
ecological niche, and thus became shared among those who could communicate with each other
because they had a common language and they lived in the same time and place.

We like this defi nition because it highlights, in one long sentence, the essential features of
culture. First, by referring to “human-made” it makes it clear that culture is concerned with
nonbiological parts of human life. This allows for explanations of behavior that are innate and do
not have to be learned (such as eating, sleeping, crying, speech Defining Culture 23 24 Chapter 1
Communication and Culture: The Challenge of the Future mechanisms, and fear). Second, the
defi nition includes what Harrison and Huntington call the “subjective” elements of culture—
elements such as “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent
among people in a society.”84 Think for a moment of all the subjective cultural beliefs and
values you hold that infl uence your interpretation of the world. Your views about the American
fl ag, work, immigration, freedom, age, ethics, dress, property rights, etiquette, healing and
health, death and mourning, play, law, individualism, magic and superstition, modesty, sex,
status differentiation, courtship, formality and informality, bodily adornment, and the like are all
part of your cultural membership. Finally, the defi nition also calls attention to the importance of
language as a symbol system that allows culture to be transmitted and shared. As Philipsen notes,
culture involves transmitted patterns of “symbols, meanings, premises, and rules.
The Basic Functions of Culture At the core of culture is the idea that it is intended to make life
easier for people by “teaching” them how to adapt to their surroundings. As Triandis notes,
culture “functions to improve the adaptation of members of the culture to a particular ecology,
and it includes the knowledge that people need to have in order to function effectively in their
social environment.”

A more detailed explanation as to the functions of culture is offered by Sowell: Cultures exist to
serve the vital, practical requirements of human life—to structure a society so as to perpetuate
the species, to pass on the hard-learned knowledge and experience of generations past and
centuries past to the young and inexperienced in order to spare the next generation the costly and
dangerous process of learning everything all over again from scratch through trial and error—
including fatal errors. What is being said is that culture serves a basic need by laying out a
predictable world in which each of you is fi rmly grounded. It thus enables you to make sense of
your surroundings. As Haviland notes, “In humans, it is culture that sets the limits on behavior
and guides it along predictable paths.” The English writer Fuller echoed the same idea in rather
simple terms when he wrote, two hundred years ago, “Culture makes all things easy.” It makes
things easy because culture shields people from the unknown by offering them a blueprint for all
of life’s activities. While people in every culture might deviate from this blueprint, they at least
know what their culture expects from them. Try to imagine a single day in your life without the
guidelines of your culture. From how to earn a living, to how an economic system works, to how
to greet strangers, to explanations of illness, to how to fi nd a mate, culture provides you with
structure.

Elements of Culture

While culture is composed of a countless number of elements (food, shelter, work, defense,
social control, psychological security, social harmony, purpose in life, etc.), there are fi ve
elements that relate directly to this book. Understanding these elements will enable you to
appreciate the notion that while all cultures share a common set of components, the acting out of
these issues often distinguishes one culture from another.