Intercultural Communication Video Summary

We read about the Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication by Laray M. Barna in class, and watched three videos that showed us of some real-life situations. The 6 stumbling blocks are the assumption of similarities, language difference, nonverbal misinterpretations, tendency to evaluate, stress and culture.
The first video was a video that the man and their family were from different cultures, therefore their eating behaviors were different too. The baseball man thought the Japanese’s manner was to slurp when they eat soba. When the women tried to serve the man for some vegetables, he thought he did not need to take it because in the U.S, it is normal for people to serve themselves. Next, when the landlord tried to make the sister fill up his cup with sake, the man gives his cup too, but in Japan,sake is served in order from the elderest. The man does not know about it, and got sulky about it. There are other misunderstandings, like stabbing the chopstick in the rice, which the Japanese does only at funerals. In this video, the man uses his own manners, but in Japan it is counted as rude because of the culture. The man does not try to change his manners and keeps acting disrespectfully to the other

The white flowers that the man tried to give to the woman was a present, but when they were left at the entrance because of the truck accidently knocking down them and got placed there, the neighbors assumed the woman died because in Italy, chrysanthemums are used at funerals. This I think applies to the "tendency to evaluate" in the 6 stumbling blocks, because the neighbors around the women does not try to look in her house, and assumes that she is already dead. They did not assume it deeply and just depended on the information that they had, which made me think that was the part they did