Understanding differences-high context and low context

American anthropologist Edward? Edward. t。 Hall once stayed in a hotel with both western-style and Japanese-style houses in the center of Tokyo for more than ten days. Most of the guests are Japanese, only a few European tourists.

One afternoon, Hall returned to the hotel from work as usual, but he was surprised to find that his luggage was missing and replaced by another stranger's belongings. For the first time, frightened Americans thought it was extremely serious to break into other people's rooms illegally.

Then he wondered in confusion where his luggage went and how it all happened. Until the front desk of the hotel politely told him that his original room needed to be given priority to other guests, the staff had changed the luggage to another room for Hall to use.

This is the first time that he changed rooms without prior notice, but it is not the last time.

All his experiences in Japan made Hall realize that it is inaccurate to judge other cultures by the value of his own culture, because his own experience just reflects the "hidden culture" in different societies.

Hall draws a conclusion from his own experience: when people face a strange culture, the two most common mistakes are pure rational analysis and cultural misreading.

It is impossible for people to gain a profound insight into the world through clear language and science itself. Talking about superficial cultural differences is just repeating cliches.

It is not enough to understand culture only through language analysis. The language expression and symbolic expression that rationality can involve is only one aspect, and there are countless details that need to be captured from life and concrete experience.

When a person who is only familiar with one culture encounters a foreign experience that he has never experienced before, he tends to explain it with his own cultural system, add "meaning" to this experience and rationalize it, which will easily lead to misunderstanding and prejudice.

Hall discovered this behavior and compared culture to a filter between people and the world. It determines what we choose to pay attention to and ignore, and also determines how we look at and explain it.

To some extent, the "information overload" brought by a single culture will collapse the value system on which a culture depends, because it can no longer digest too much novel information. An extreme example is Nazi Germany. After World War II, some philosophers found that the existing German cultural values (even the world-wide values) could not give a reasonable and scientific explanation for Nazi behavior, so they went back to study the causes of Nazi again and again. One of the famous scholars, Arendt, chose not to use logical analysis, but to restore the personal character and environment of Nazi officers to interpret the motives behind the Holocaust.

This kind of "information overload" has caused various problems in cross-cultural communication, so the new demand for cultural understanding prompted Hall to put forward his context theory for the first time, reminding people not only to pay attention to the obvious information, but also to the hidden meaning outside the information that is not directly clarified by symbol codes. He divided this theory into two parts according to different cultural backgrounds: high context and low context.

In communication, language in high context is limited and fragmented, while language in low context is exquisite and comprehensive. For example, in the relatively high-context environment of family intimacy, the language is usually short and fragmentary, unlike the low-context business language, which strives for accuracy.

Understanding the language content in high-context culture requires long-term accumulated ideas and behavior habits, because it is rooted in past experience and history, forming a unified, interrelated, lasting and unchanging, slowly changing and highly stable whole.

Although this context can make communication more economical, convenient and effective in theory, people don't have to spend too much energy to explain information, but they need to spend a lot of time to cultivate tacit understanding. Because it has a "threshold", it is difficult for people who lack the same values and historical experience to quickly integrate into the dialogue.

In a low-context cultural system, people need stronger expressive ability to throw clear ideas, backgrounds and details to avoid misunderstanding, because they rarely have similar group experiences. However, the entry threshold is not high, which makes it easier for outsiders to join the dialogue and achieve communication results in a short time.

Figure 1: Different Emphasis of High and Low Context

This picture can simply summarize the difference between high context and low context: high context embodies a kind of emphasis on communicative context, and people can reach an agreement in advance through their familiar values and customs, even though they don't say it now without repeating information; On the contrary, low context does not assume pre-existing conventions, but emphasizes the importance of symbolic information itself and concept interpretation. At the same time, what runs through these two communication methods is the ultimate goal of communication-meaning.

Many cultural researchers find that the level of context is often closely related to the cultural differences between the East and the West.

Meyer ranked the eastern and western countries according to the differences in communication context caused by language and history.

Figure 2: Distribution of high and low environments in different countries

The left end of the horizontal axis is low context and the right end is high context. It is well known that western countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada and Britain are all classified as low-context communication countries. All Roman-speaking European countries, such as Italy, Spain and France, and Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, are often located in the middle of the axis; Most African and Asian countries are listed under the background of right deviation.

Among them, Meyer thinks that Japan is the most extreme cultural country with high context in the world-not only because the same sentence in Japanese can be interpreted many times according to the context, but also because the Japanese people have developed a long history and culture on the basis of limited land and population, which is enough to make them have hidden communication methods that others can't understand immediately.

Of course, high and low contexts and eastern and western cultures are not absolute binary divisions, but only to point out the different tendencies of various complex cultures.

When we face groups from different countries, we need to think about practical communication strategies according to each other's cultural background and change our usual way of speaking.

Especially in the business field where communication efficiency is extremely important, the concreteness and complexity of cross-cultural context are the key to cooperation. Only when we know whether the other person cares about ideas, people, behaviors or other things can we constantly correct our way of speaking, words and deeds, avoid poor communication caused by too high a context, and avoid inefficient work, information redundancy and cultural conflicts caused by too low a context. ?

Many Americans have heard the saying, "Tell them what you have to say, and then tell them what you have told them." This is a simple summary of the philosophy of communication in low context, which is in sharp contrast with China's "words fail to convey meaning" and "implication". Traditionally, China people prefer to put what they really want to express in the whole communication environment rather than say it directly.

Under this high-context cultural background, China enterprises need to adjust their traditional expression and communication methods to improve their information, details and organizational abilities when communicating with low-context cultural countries such as the United States and Canada.

First, state reasons, express opinions and repeat opinions clearly, in detail and concretely;

Second, in some cases, the realistic approach is to show what you don't understand and ask the other party to make further explanations;

Third, you don't even have to be so polite, because sometimes it's easy to ignore the goal and make the information more uncertain and vague.

In addition, when China enterprises communicate with each other through websites, social media and other channels, they should also consider how low-context culture has greatly influenced group preferences, especially the functionality of design. Enterprises should clearly express the purpose and product information of the website, and help customers find what they are looking for quickly through access guides, complete content and efficient search engines.

In short, we need to realize that in low-context culture, meaning is mostly expressed clearly through language. When something is not clear enough in communication, low-context cultural groups usually want to be explained and explained. Therefore, direct and linear language expression and a lot of written and written communication can enable China enterprises to better meet the needs of cultural customers in low context and realize effective cross-border communication.

refer to