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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