Essay On Cultural Characteristics

1288 Words6 Pages

Let us commence a journey into the topic of structure-based cultural characteristics. People do not realize how often they use these characteristics, but as long as you are communicating with other individuals or even doing something as simple as studying in a group or by yourself you are portraying your own, personal, cultural characteristics. People express themselves everyday by using cultural characteristics and they do not even realize it, in this paper we will dig deeper into what individual cultural characteristics are, what high-context cultural characteristics are, which characteristic I belong to, and how being this way has effected a moment in my everyday life. To begin with let us discuss what it means to have a individualistic …show more content…

To be high-context one tends to use more body language and take more from the tone of voice. High-context individuals also tend to put more emphasis on relationships between two individuals. For example, Gudykunst mentions that people with high-context cultural characteristics find out more about other individuals so they can have a better idea of who this new person they meet will turn into the longer they spend time together (50). This affects communication because even though two people have just met this one high-context individual is already making assumption of what this other individual is going to be like. Gudykunst explains that high-context individuals should watch what they say around low-context individuals and that high-context people are already assuming what this other person is going to be like (51). High-context people judge one another quicker than those who are from low-context cultures. For the most part individualistic and high-context cultural characteristics have an effect on my life every day. For instance I use high-context every day at my university since I meet someone new every day. Unfortunately I tend to create an image of what, I believe, each person I meet is like and that creates an image of who I think they will be in the

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