Chapter 2 Background to Intercultural Communication

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Intercultural communication involves skills that facilitate

relationships, break down barriers, and create foundations for new visions.

Personal Style Affects Our First Impressions, Which Influence Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication can be described in terms of the communication styles used by people. Communication style means the personal qualities we infer from the messages and the manner of a communicator. For example, some people have a dominant communicator style; others have a submissive style. Some are warm and caring; others are cold and unfeeling. Some are authoritar­ian; others are open-minded. Some communicators are preoccupied; others are attentive. Other personal communication styles include being extremely friendly, being a mediator between people, being a counselor, being a critic, being a question asker, being an informed opinion giver, and being a victim.

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Part 1 Introduction and Background to Intercultural Communication

Sometimes these "styles" or forms of social communication are conscious. In such cases, people communicate about the way they view themselves, and they intend to make a certain kind of impression. More often, people are not aware of their communication style. In this case, they act from habits formed in culture, family, and individuality. Very few of us remain unaffected by the vari­ous communication styles we encounter.

Intercultural communication depends upon reducing uncertainty levels about other people. In our interpersonal encounters, there is always some ambiguity about the relationship: "How does he feel about me?" "What are her attitudes?" "What can I expect to happen next in this relationship?" We experience discom­fort with questions about relationships, and so to reduce our discomfort, we en­gage in behaviors that enhance our chances of maximum understanding with the fewest possible questions.

In the field of communication, predictability is something of the opposite of uncertainty and remains an important aspect of relationships. We seem to need a certain amount of redundancy to lessen the entropy (the "new" messages or the un­familiar part of a message) in communication. In other words, the less guesswork about a message and a relationship, often the better we feel about the situation.

Communication with a person from a different culture poses proportionately more ambiguities and uncertainties. Some form of predictability is needed to combat the uncertainty. By employing some "standard" areas of predictability, we reduce the impact of what would otherwise be different, unusual, and uncer­tain. In greetings, for instance, there is a range of acceptable cultural practices. Throughout the conversation, various cultural rules guide the communication. If we share the same culture, the communication rules are implicitly understood, and the job of deciphering and interpreting the other person is significantly easier.

Interaction with someone from another culture, however, means that we do not necessarily share the same communication rules, and the ambiguity in­creases dramatically. There are significantly more possible behaviors during in­tercultural communication than during intracultural communication.

One answer to facing uncertainty is to offer predictability, using communi­cation rules, customs, rituals, phrases, and features that match the other person's culture. A second way to face uncertainty is to understand and manage the inter­action stages typical of people meeting: precontact, contact and impression, and closure.

Precontact. The first phase of reducing uncertainty involves precontact impression formation. In coming in contact with another person, we proceed from an unfocused scanning of the environment to a focused scanning (Barnlund 1968). We become aware that another person is a part of the immediate commu­nication climate. At that point, we engage in reciprocal scanning. We gain in­formation by interpreting the appearance and mannerisms of the other person, while the other person does the same with us. The strategies can be quite com­plicated, but we reduce uncertainty on a simple and efficient level during this first phase (Berger, Gardner, Parks, Shulman, and Miller 1976).

Intercultural Communication Involves Reducing Uncertainty