CULTURAL VALUES: Guidelines For Behavior

CULTURAL VALUES: Guidelines for behavior
INTRODUCTION
The preceding chapters provided you an understanding of culture’s role in
guiding your daily life. What you think and how you perceive the world is
strongly influenced by cultural values. What you consider important is
often a product of values learned during childhood and these values
motivate your behavior. Values are what give a culture its distinctive
quality. An attitude you hold, an opinion, a moral issue, a question of
ethics, a proposed course of action, the ways to behave in a particular
context are strongly influenced by cultural values, and your values can
conflict with those from another culture. The ability to recognize and
manage this conflict plays a central role in successful intercultural
communication. This chapter will make you aware of the impact of
cultural values and provide understanding of how values could be
different across cultures. To accomplish this we will 1) examine
perception, 2) link perception to culture, 3) briefly discuss values.
UNDERSTANDING PERCEPTION
In order to interpret and understand the everyday world, people construct mental
models, and the resulting perceptions are shaped by the interpretive quality of our
human brains. In other words, perception is comprised of two stages: physiological,
when our brain obtains information through senses, and psychological, when the
brain processes this information and attaches meanings to it, thus constructing our
reality. Culture plays a very large role in this process.
A simple illustration of culture’s influence on perception is what people see looking at
the moon. Most Americans visualize a human face, but many Japanese perceive a
rabbit; and Samoans report a woman weaving. These interpretations are caused by
myths about the moon found in every culture. This shows how cultures teach their
members to look at the world in different ways. Perception can be defined as the
process of converting external symbols into meaningful internal understanding –
and most of these meanings are given by cultures.
As was pointed out previously, by exposing communities of people to similar
experiences, culture generates similar meanings and similar behaviors. For
example, Westerners praise frankness, and lively debates based on facts. In
contrast, the Japanese speak publicly only in socially acceptable terms, and reveal
their real thought only in private settings. From this it is easy to imagine, how a
culturally uninformed Westerner might perceive a Japanese speaker as evasive and
ambiguous.
UNDERSTANDING PERCEPTION - Continued
It should be clear from these examples that culture influences one’s

subjective reality and that there are direct links between culture,
perception and behavior. A more comprehensive appreciation of
perception, its functions and deficiencies can be acquired by
understanding the following characteristics offered by Adler and
Gunderson.
• Perception is selective – because there are too many things competing
for the attention of your senses at a time, you focus on selected
information and filter out the rest.
• Perception is learned – culture and personal life’s experiences teach
you to see the world in certain ways.
• Perception is [relatively] consistent – once you perceive something in a
particular manner, that perception is slow to change.
• Perception is inaccurate – you view the world through a subjective lens
influenced by culture and personal experiences, which tends to make
you see what you want to see.
UNDERSTANDING VALUES
What you find desirable for yourself and the society you live in is a result of your values.
More precisely, culturally shaped personal values determine how we live our lives.
Values are not only held by individuals, they are also the domain of the collective. Values
guide the behavior of people in society and shape social norms in a given culture. In
short, values establish the standards for maintaining a culture.
The significance of values is that they inform members of a culture as to what is
considered right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect, appropriate and
inappropriate, in almost every context of human behavior. In any society there will be
values concerning how people should treat each other, how they should work, the
proper kinds of recreation, the correct relation to the supernatural, the vest ways to
relate to other societies, how to socialize children, and so on. Institutionalized cultural
values define what is worth dying for, what is worth protecting, what frightens people,
what is worthy of study, and what deserves ridicule.
Values – like all important aspects of culture – are gained through a variety of sources
(family, history, religion, schools, oral tradition, art, media, etc.) and therefore tend to
be broad-based, enduring, and relatively stable. A culture’s value system establishes
the expected, normative modes of behavior for members of that culture and the
criteria for judging people’s conduct. Unfortunately, those criteria are often applied to
members of other cultures who have different values, ad this frequently results in
misunderstanding. A good rule of thumb for any intercultural encounter is, “if you
consider the other person strange, they probably consider you strange too.”

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