Cultural Comparison Paper - Essay Example

Cultural Comparison Paper Cultural Comparison Paper Communication/public speaking is significantly influenced by culture. This means that all communication is cultural in nature in that it depends on the ways people have learnt to speak. People from different cultures communicate differently; persuasively or informatively. However, there are certain types of communication/public speaking that are common in some cultures. Factors like individual personality, context, mood interaction, and other cultural influences affect people’s choices. Communication is interactive, and improves our relationships with people from other cultures. However, a challenge may arise when miscommunication happens. This is very possible if there are significant differences between the audience and the speaker. Miscommunication may lead to disagreements, or aggravate conflict that already exists. To avoid miscommunication, there is a need to understand how people from other cultures communicate, and the most common types of communication they engage in. To understand cross-cultural communication differences, I decided to interview, Amit Kumar, from the Eastern culture, Asia. Amit Kumar is a student at a local college, and comes from my neighborhood, so we interact a lot while on vacation. I chose to interview him since he comes from a culture that is completely different from mine. So having him as my interviewee helped me learn several differences of Eastern and Western cultures, and how people from the two cultures communicate. Culture is a very significant aspect of communication because it determines how content of messages are formed, and it tells us which messages are noticed and which ones are clearly interpreted. History indicates that early democracies of the west were built on traditions of persuasion and argumentation. Even today, people from the East believe that for the speaker to persuade his or her audience, he or she should use sound arguments and apply reliable evidence. The western culture favor stories, analogies, parables and allegories. People from the culture believe that stories are very powerful form of evidence. From my conversation with Amit I came to realize that there are significant differences between the way people from my culture and his culture communicate. From the conversation, I apprehended that people from the East love non-verbal communication. More often, Amit used stories to justify his claims, which did not go well with me. People from my culture, I included, prefer concrete data. Also, the cultures differ on what constitutes a reliable source of evidence. In Arabic culture, authoritative person is a person with the most education or the oldest in a certain lineage. However, in the West, the authority is someone associated with the Supreme Being, or a religion. Cultures that put more emphasis on logic, for example my own culture, deemphasizes emotions and feelings. However, we anticipate that a persuasive speaker will offer sufficient evidence to support his or her claims. Amit culture shows feelings, he was emotional, and produced less evidence. He told me that in their culture, it is not a must to show evidence since being emotional is enough to tell your story. However, Arabic language combines ideas with the use of conjunctions. Speaking with Amit revealed that Arabs do not always place their major points where we expect them. This means that Arabs have a difficulty with Western linear thinking. Different cultures teach public speakers different ways of introducing their speeches. In the United States, public debaters or speakers are taught to utter attention-getting words or statements to capture the concentration of their audiences. This can be attained in several ways such as by use of rhetorical questions, a startling statistic, a story, a brief demonstration, and a reference to a certain event, a humorous story or even a joke (Samorva, 2008).. Humor is not considered appropriate during speech making, but in other cultures, it is considered appropriate. Amit made humorous statements while talking to me, only to realize that it is something he is used to. However, Arabs do not rely on preview statements to grasp the audience of the listeners. Arabic culture is a listener responsible culture unlike Western culture which is speaker responsible culture. Arabic culture believes that it is offensive to inform listeners what they should listen to. This means that in listener-responsible cultures, the listeners have a duty to construct a meaning of the messages presented to them based on common values, beliefs, and norms. Another revelation that was evident from our conversation was that Arabs tend to favor speakers of few words. Such behavior is seen to be reflective. However, self-disclosure is highly valued by Americans, but it is not valued by Easterners. Arabic cultures expect speakers to be emotional in their vocal and visual mannerisms. To act otherwise, one is said to lack conviction. They also expect speakers to have a great deal of embellishment in their talk; thus, a speaker addressing Arab audience would be forced to use similes and metaphors. In many Eastern cultures, speaker’s reputation and status has a lot to do with his credibility. The oldest people in Arabic culture are highly valued as credible sources, but are not mostly quoted in public speaking because the culture does not have a long tradition of a free press, thus even quoting the so called credible sources would have insignificant impact on the attention of the audience. However, in nations that experienced civilization during early years like America, citing great people such as Martin Luther King, Aristotle, Plato , just to mention a few is highly valued. The use of visual aids varies from one culture to the other. Visual aids are very useful when speaking with people from other cultures, particularly if English is not their first language. While talking to Amit Kumar, he kept on using visual aids to make sure I clearly got his message. Arabs like convincing and persuading their audience, and this explains why they keep on using visual aids. They consider visual aids as a piece of evidence of what they are being told about. However, when it comes to concluding a given discussion, I noticed that Arabs do it in a different manner. Unlike Americans who structure their conclusions in a very low context way, by use of words like, in conclusion, in summary, followed by a review of the major points discussed, Arabs close their speech by explaining future relationships, but not stressing the ideas they discuss in the body of the speech. A good example from my discussion with Amit Kumar, which entailed how Arabs conduct themselves during public address, is while I was summarizing the points discussed; Amit was busy telling me how he plans to pursue master’s degree in Chicago. He seemed to forget that we were discussing about the mentioned topic. The duration and the amount of eye contact a speaker has with the audience are culturally specific. In America, looking directly at the people you are addressing is a very significant aspect of creating credibility. It means that the information being passed is believable and trustworthy (Samorva, 2008). There is a common belief in America that if a speaker maintains an eye contact, he or she won’t tell lies. In Asia, speakers do not need to use prolonged eye contact to establish credibility, and audience may show their attentiveness by looking away from the communicator. Amit did not seem to keep direct eye contact, something that worried me that he would not provide me with the information I needed, but to my surprise, he answered every question I asked. The use of non-verbal communication was very common with Amit Kumar. He hardly made a point without using non-verbal cues such as tone variation, body movement, eyebrow movements, illustrators, and gestures, just to mention a few. However, some meanings of these symbols differed from what I know. While I used OK to signal consent and understanding, OK to Amit signaled money. The interview I conducted together with some research helped me understand that there are differences in the ways people communicate based on their cultural values. From the above investigation it can be noted that cultural aspects influence a lot the way people communicate with one another. Cultures influence the following aspects of communication, the use of body language, use of eye contact, use of visual aids, the way people introduce and conclude speeches, as well as how people convince others while communicating. Reference Samovar, L. (2008). Oral Communication: Speaking Across Cultures, (p. 252-253). New York: McGraw Hill. Read More