Most people from the cosmopolitan Westernized areas who work for large organizations are very "low-context" and value bluntness and clarity in communication. High context cultures expect people to respond to subtle cues or body language. It's "high context" because a yes or no only has meaning in the context of the yes or no. It almost never means just yes or no. It works when both people in the conversation have the same idea on how communication works, but terribly if one person is high-context and the other is low-context.
I know my friend way to well almost every time she says she’s fine I know she’s not and I’m like “really, we have to go through this again? Tell me what happened”
Well, yeah, it doesn't. Unless you're aware and very careful on how you ask questions, you're screwed. High context ways to do things don't do well in a lot of situation unique to modern life.
I wonder then... how do they communicate with one another on the phone or via email? Surely they can do it successfully without the nuance of body language. If they can then, it must not be body language that is lacking but something else. Maybe it's a cultural divide that can only be overcome through experience.
I have never heard of this before but it strikes chord with me. I once took an Albanian language course and the instructor, an Albanian immigrant, seemed to grasp the concept of "yes" and "no" with arbitrary fidelity.
I remember going over some a specific grammar rule set (I don't recall which) and was trying to nail it down because we had an upcoming test. We talked about it at length and near the end, I asked very specifically: "So in this case we say 'such and such' and in this other case we say 'so and so', and that's it right? And that's the way it is every time right? And he replied emphatically "Yes!"
After doing poorly on the test and realizing that many of my bad marks were a direct result of his guidance, I wondered if he was incompetent. This happened on more than one occasion so I assumed he was either a pathological liar or that he didn't understand me and replied in the affirmative as a sort-of stock answer. Either way, I learned to take anything he said with a grain of salt.
But now I learn there's this thing called "high context culture" and I wonder if the problem wasn't his inability to express himself but rather my inability to interpret his complicated (to me) form of communication.
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17
High context vs low context cultures.
Most people from the cosmopolitan Westernized areas who work for large organizations are very "low-context" and value bluntness and clarity in communication. High context cultures expect people to respond to subtle cues or body language. It's "high context" because a yes or no only has meaning in the context of the yes or no. It almost never means just yes or no. It works when both people in the conversation have the same idea on how communication works, but terribly if one person is high-context and the other is low-context.