An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. Fred E. Jandt
It was through rhetorical persuasion that one could attempt to change another’s perception. The attributes of individual objects are the basis of categorization of objects, and categories are subject to behavioral rules that can be discovered and understood by the human mind. Thus rocks and other objects are in the category of objects that have the property of gravity.
Map 3.1 The Influence of Ancient Greek Thought
Source: Adapted from Nau (2012, p. 77).
Note: Shaded regions represent the Roman and Greek Empires at their furthest extent.
The Chinese counterpart to the Greek sense of personal agency was harmony. Every Chinese was a member of a family and a village. The Chinese were less concerned with controlling their own destinies but more concerned with self-control so as to minimize conflict with others in the family and village. For the Chinese, the world is constantly changing, and every event is related to every other event. The Chinese understood the world as continuously interacting substances, so perception focused on the entire context or environment. Chinese thought is to see things in their context in which all the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves.
Effect of Culture on Sensing
How much alike, then, are two persons’ sensations? Individuals raised in diverse cultures can actually sense the world differently. For example, Marshall H. Segall and his associates (Segall, Campbell, & Herskovits, 1966) found that people who live in forests or in rural areas can sense crooked and slanted lines more accurately than can people who live in urban areas. This demonstrates that the rural and urban groups sense the same event differently as a result of their diverse cultural learnings.
The term Field dependence refers to the degree to which perception of an object is influenced by the background or environment in which it appears. Some people are less likely than others to separate an object from its surrounding environment. When adults in Japan and the United States were shown an animated underwater scene in which one large fish swims among small fish and other marine life, the Japanese described the scene and commented more about the relationships among the objects in the scene. The Americans were more likely to begin with a description of the big fish and make only half as many comments about the relationships among the objects. Not surprisingly, when showed a second scene with the same big fish, the Americans were more likely to recognize the big fish as the same one as in the first scene (Nisbett, 2003).
More recently, Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen (2003) showed Japanese and European-Americans a picture of a square with a line inside it (see Figure 3.2). The participants were then given an empty square of a different size and asked to draw either a line the same length as the one they had seen or a line of the same relative length to the one they had seen. The European-Americans were significantly more accurate in drawing the line of the same length, while the Japanese were significantly more accurate in drawing the line of relative length. Differences in the environment and culture affected sensation.
Figure 3.2 Stimulus for Culture’s Effect on Sensation
Source: Ishii & Kitayama (2003).
The researchers then compared Americans who had been living in Japan for a few years and Japanese who had been living in the United States for a few years. Given the same picture and task, the Americans who had been living in Japan were close to the Japanese in the original study, while the Japanese who had been living in the United States were virtually the same as the native-born Americans. While other explanations are possible, one strong suggestion is that even living for an extended time in a new culture can modify sensation and cognitive processes.
Perceiving
Culture also has a great effect on the Perception process (Tajfel, 1969; Triandis, 1964). Human perception is usually thought of as a three-step process of selection, organization, and interpretation. Each of these steps is affected by culture.
Selection
The first step in the perception process is Selection. Within your physiological limitations, you are exposed to more stimuli than you could possibly manage. To use sight as an example, you may feel that you are aware of all stimuli on your retinas, but most of the data from the retinas are handled on a subconscious level by a variety of specialized systems. Parts of our brains produce output from the retinas that we cannot “see.” No amount of introspection can make us aware of those processes.
In an interesting study by Simons and Chabris (1999), participants viewed video of a basketball game. They were told to count the number of passes one team made. In the video, a woman dressed as a gorilla walks into the game, turns to face the camera, and beats her fists on her chest. Fifty percent of all people who watch the video don’t see the gorilla. Mack and Rock (1998) argue that we don’t consciously see any object unless we are paying direct, focused attention to that object. When we need something, have an interest in it, or want it, we are more likely to sense it out of competing stimuli. When we’re hungry, we’re more likely to attend to food advertisements.
Being in a busy airport terminal is another example. While there, you are confronted with many competing stimuli. You simply cannot attend to everything. However, if in the airport terminal an announcement is made asking you by name to report to the ticketing counter, you will probably hear your name even in that environment of competing stimuli. Just as you’ve learned to attend to the sound of your name, you’ve learned from your culture to select out other stimuli from the environment. A newborn child is a potential speaker of any language. Having heard only those sounds of one’s own language and having learned to listen to and make only those differentiations necessary, anyone would find it difficult to hear crucial differences in speech sounds in another language.
Japanese/English Difficulties With Speech Sounds
If you grew up speaking English, certain aspects of the Japanese language are difficult for you to perceive. These aspects do not occur in English, so you never learned to listen for them and you literally do not hear them. For example, vowel length does not matter in English. You could say “Alabama” or “Alabaaama,” and others would know you’re referring to a southern U.S. state. Vowel length is important in Japanese. Japanese has short-duration vowels and long-duration vowels. Vowel length in the following pairs of Japanese words actually determines their meanings:
obasan: aunt
obaasan: grandmother
kita: came
kiita: heard
Because vowel length is not a critical attribute in English, perceiving the difference in sounds is a problem for those attempting to understand Japanese.
Other sounds that present difficulties for English speakers are the following:
Double consonants:
shita: did
shitta: new
Accent:
kaki: oyster
kaki: persimmon
Pitch:
hashi: bridge
hashi: chopsticks
hashi: edge of a table
If you grew up speaking Japanese, some aspects of the English language are difficult