Nonverbal Communication and Culture

Nonverbal communication norms can vary significantly from one culture to the next. The first concept to understand is the meaning of culture. Culture "describes activities or behaviors, refer to the heritage or tradition of a group, describe rules and norms" and otherwise describes "general characteristics" of a group (Matsumoto, chapter 1). Cultures arise from such things as environmental conditions, needs and motives. Culture with respect to communication governs the norms of communication within a given society. Every society has a need for social coordination, and culture is the intermediary by which the norms of in-group communication occur (Matsumoto, chapter 1). Thus, culture typically governs the norms within a group with respect to all forms of communication, including the non-verbal.

When one is raised in a culture, one learns how to communicate within that culture. The forms that communication takes are passed along within that culture so that while one is growing up, the norms regarding that culture are learned. Culture is differentiated in a number of ways. A culture arises out of geography and other factors, and can also be influenced strongly by thins like language and religion. When a cultural group is differentiated in some way, that group develops its own culture, with its own communication norms. As a result, the different elements of nonverbal communication such as gestures, personal space, touch, and facial expressions are going to be different for each group.

Ethnocentrism arises when people have the worldview that their culture is the base culture, and that all other cultures are essentially compared to one's own culture, rather than understood on their own merits. Thus, other cultures become conceived through the differences to one's own culture. It is difficult not to have a little bit of ethnocentrism in the sense that we all grew up learning a culture and others naturally do not occupy the same position in our worldview. The key is to understand one's ethnocentrism, and to account for it when thinking about other cultures.

This is where understanding different cultures can help to reduce the outcomes of ethnocentrism. For example, in some cultures direct eye contact is not normal, whereas Americans typically find that they want to look someone in the eye, especially when making a deal. Someone who will not make eye contact is inherently going to be considered untrustworthy. The key is to understand that this view is actually ethnocentric, and that the signal a particular element of body language sends from one person may not be the same as it is received by the other. In communication, messages are only effective when the sender and receive both understand the message being sent, which is not the case when the sender and receive are of two cultures and that message means something different to each. Many misunderstandings would not occur if the people involved were better aware of their own ethnocentrism, and looked for another explanation for the apparent discord.