by Erin Meyer
I received lessons in low-context communication at home, too. Like many siblings, my older brother and I argued constantly. In an effort to reduce our squabbling, Mom used to coach us in active listening: You speak to me as clearly and explicitly as possible. Then I’ll repeat what I understood you to say as clearly and explicitly as I can. The technique is designed to help people quickly identify and correct misunderstandings, thereby reducing (if not eliminating) one common cause of needless, pointless debate.
Childhood lessons like these imbued me with the assumption that being explicit is simply good communication. But, as Takaki explained, good communication in a high-context culture like Japan is very different. In Japan as in India, China, and many other countries, people learn a very different style of communication as children—one that depends on unconscious assumptions about common reference points and shared knowledge.
For example, let’s say that you and a business colleague named Maryam both come from a high-context culture like Iran. Imagine that Maryam has traveled to your home for a visit and arrived via a late-evening train at 10:00 p.m. If you ask Maryam whether she would like to eat something before going to bed, when Maryam responds with a polite “No, thank you,” your response will be to ask her two more times. Only if she responds “No, thank you” three times will you accept “No” as her real answer.
The explanation lies in shared assumptions that every polite Iranian understands. Both you and Maryam know that a well-mannered person will not accept food the first time it is offered, no matter how hungry she may be. Thus, if you don’t ask her a second or third time, Maryam may go to bed suffering from hunger pains, while you feel sorry that she hasn’t tasted the chicken salad you’d prepared especially for her.
In a high-context culture like Iran, it’s not necessary—indeed, it’s often inappropriate—to spell out certain messages too explicitly. If Maryam replied to your first offer of food, “Yes, please serve me a big portion of whatever you have, because I am dying of hunger!” this response would be considered inelegant and perhaps quite rude. Fortunately, shared assumptions learned from childhood make such bluntness unnecessary. You and Maryam both know that “No, thank you” likely means, “Please ask me again because I am famished.”
Remember my confusing encounter with the concierge in New Delhi? If I had been an Indian from Delhi with the shared cultural understanding of how to interpret implicit messages, I would have been better able to interpret the concierge’s directions. Lacking those assumptions left me bewildered and unable to find my way to the restaurant.
THE INTERPLAY OF LANGUAGE AND HISTORY
Languages reflect the communication styles of the cultures that use those languages. For example, Japanese and Hindi (as spoken in New Delhi) are both high-context languages, in which a relatively high percentage of words can be interpreted multiple ways based on how and when they are used. In Japanese, for instance, the word “ashi” means both “leg” and “foot,” depending on context. Japanese also possesses countless homonyms, of which there are only a few in English (“dear” and “deer,” for example). In Hindi the word “kal” means both tomorrow and yesterday. You have to hear the whole sentence to understand in which context it has been used. For this reason, when speaking Japanese or Hindi, you really do have to “read the air” to understand the message.
I work in English and also in French, a much higher-context language than English. For one thing, there are seven times more words in English than in French (500,000 versus 70,000), which suggests that French relies on contextual clues to resolve semantic ambiguities to a greater extent than English. Many words in French have multiple possible meanings—for example, ennuyé can mean either “bored” or “bothered” depending on the context in which it’s used—which means that the listener is responsible for discerning the intention of the speaker.
The French language contains a number of idioms that specifically refer to high-context communication. One is sous-entendu, literally meaning “under the heard.” To use a sous-entendu basically means to say something without saying it. For example, if a man says to his wife, “There are a lot of calories in that toffee ice cream you bought,” his sous-entendu may be “You have gained some weight, so don’t eat this ice cream.” He has not explicitly said that she is getting fat, but when he sees her reach down to throw a shoe at him, he will know that she picked up his sous-entendu.
I once asked a French client, who was complaining about an incompetent team leader, whether he had described the problem to his boss. The client responded. “Well, yes, but it was a sous-entendu. I made it known so that he could see it if he wanted to see it.” The same expressions exist in Spanish (sobrentendido) and Portuguese (subentendido) and although less common, they are used in much the same way.
A similar French expression refers to saying something at the deuxième degré (literally, “the second degree”). I may say one thing explicitly—my first-degree message—but the statement may have an unspoken subtext which is the second-degree meaning.
The use of second-degree messages is a feature of French literature. Consider the seventeenth-century writer Jean de La Fontaine. At the first degree, he wrote simple children’s tales, but if you understand the contemporary context within which the stories were written, you may pick up his second degree of meaning—a political message for adults. For example, La Fontaine’s famous fable of the grasshopper and the ant conveys a straightforward moral that most children understand: It’s important to economize to prepare for difficult times. But only sophisticated adult readers of his own day recognized La Fontaine’s second-degree message—that King Louis XIV should stop spending so much money on rerouting the Eure River to supply water to the Versailles fountains.
In France, a good business communicator will use second-degree communication in everyday life. While giving a presentation, a manager may say one thing that has an explicit meaning everyone understands. But those who have some shared context may also receive a second-degree message that is the real intended meaning.
English, then, is a lower-context language than the Romance languages descended from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), while the Romance languages are lower context than most Asian languages. However, a look at the Communicating scale and its ranking of cultures from most explicit to most implicit shows that language is not the whole story (see Figure 1.1).
The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world, and all Anglo-Saxon cultures fall on the left-hand side of the scale, with the United Kingdom as the highest-context culture of the Anglo-Saxon cluster. All the countries that speak Romance languages, including European countries like Italy, Spain, and France, and Latin American countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, fall to the middle right of the scale. Brazil is the lowest-context culture in this cluster. Many African and Asian countries fall even further right. Japan has the distinction of being the highest-context culture in the world.
FIGURE 1.1. COMMUNICATING
As you can see, language only gives a partial indicator as to where a culture will fall on the Communicating scale. The gap between the United States and the United Kingdom, both Anglo-Saxon countries, is quite large, as is the gap between Brazil and Peru, both Romance-language countries.
Beyond language, the history of a country strongly impacts its position on the Communicating scale. For an example, just think for a minute about the histories of the two bookend countries on the scale, the United States and Japan.
High-context cultures tend to have a long shared history. Usually they are relationship-oriented societies where networks of connections are passed on from generation to generation, generating more shared context among community members. Japan is an island society with a homogeneous population and thousands of years of shared history, during a significant portion of which Japan was closed off from the rest of the world. Over these thousands of years, people became particularly skilled at picking up each other’s messages—reading the air,
as Takaki said.
By contrast, the United States, a country with a mere few hundred years of shared history, has been shaped by enormous inflows of immigrants from various countries around the world, all with different histories, different languages, and different backgrounds. Because they had little shared context, Americans learned quickly that if they wanted to pass a message, they had to make it as explicit and clear as possible, with little room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.
So within each language cluster you may notice a pattern (see Figure 1.2). First, countries are clustered by language type. On the left, you see the Anglo-Saxon cluster, followed by the Romance language cluster, and finally, furthest to the right, is a cluster of countries speaking Asian languages. Then within each cluster, you might notice how length of history and level of homogeneity impact the communication style. For example, within the Anglo-Saxon cluster, the United States has the most linguistic and cultural diversity and the shortest shared history. This helps to explain why the United States is the lowest-context of the Anglo-Saxon cultures. In the Romance cluster, Brazil has the most diversity and is the lowest-context culture. The same pattern holds with Asia, where the lower-context countries like Singapore and India have the most linguistic and cultural diversity.
FIGURE 1.2. COMMUNICATING
The American anthropologist Edward Hall, who originally developed the concept of low- and high-context communication while working on Native American reservations in the 1930s, often used the analogy of marriage to describe the differences between high- and low-context communication. Imagine what happens when two people are married for fifty or sixty years. Having shared the same context for so long, they can gather enormous amounts of information just by looking at each other’s faces or gestures. Newlyweds, however, need to state their messages explicitly and repeat them frequently to ensure they are received accurately.1 The comparison to countries with longer or shorter shared histories is obvious.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD COMMUNICATOR?
In everyday life, we all communicate explicitly sometimes, while passing messages between the lines in other situations. But when you say someone is “a good communicator,” what exactly do you mean? The way you answer this question suggests where you fall on the scale.
A Dutch executive in one of my classes noticed his country’s low-context positioning on the scale and protested, “We speak between the lines in the Netherlands, too.” But when asked whether a businessman who communicates between the lines frequently would be considered a good or a bad communicator, he didn’t have to think long. “Bad. That’s the difference between us and the French,” he said. “In the Netherlands, if you don’t say it straight, we don’t think you are trustworthy.”
If you’re from a low-context culture, you may perceive a high-context communicator as secretive, lacking transparency, or unable to communicate effectively. Lou Edmondson, an American vice president for sales at Kraft who travels around the world negotiating deals with suppliers in Asia and Eastern Europe, put it starkly: “I have always believed that people say what they mean and mean what they say—and if they don’t, well, then, they are lying.”
On the other hand, if you’re from a high-context culture, you might perceive a low-context communicator as inappropriately stating the obvious (“You didn’t have to say it! We all understood!”), or even as condescending and patronizing (“You talk to us like we are children!”). Although I have lived and worked outside the United States for many years, low-context communication is still my natural style. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have been subjected to both of these accusations more than once by my European colleagues.
A few years ago, a New York–based financial institution that I’d worked with previously asked me to do a cultural audit of their organization. Since corporate culture is not my specialty and I lacked the time necessary to do this project justice, I approached an Italian colleague whom I’ll call Paolo about collaborating with me.
Paolo greeted me cheerfully when we met in his office. Twenty-five years my senior, Paolo has a well-earned reputation as an exceptional researcher and writer. He gave me a copy of his newest book and listened with interest as I described the collaboration opportunity. I started by explaining that my work, family, and writing commitments provided very little time for this project. Paolo nodded, and then the two of us explored the opportunity in more depth, discussing the client company and the specific issues that needed to be addressed. Still feeling a bit anxious about my time limitations, I repeated that Paolo would need to do 80 percent of the work (and would of course receive 80 percent of the compensation). Then we returned to exploring the needs of the client and possible approaches, but after a few more minutes, I once again slipped in my concern about time.
Paolo laughed impatiently: “Erin, I am not a child. I was not born yesterday. I understand very well what your point is.” I felt myself blushing with embarrassment. Paolo is quite used to reading subtle messages; he had grasped my not-so-subtle point the first time. I apologized, wondering whether Paolo often reacted this way when speaking with the dozens of American faculty members at INSEAD who clarify and repeat themselves endlessly.
The moral of the story is clear: You may be considered a top-flight communicator in your home culture, but what works at home may not work so well with people from other cultures.
One interesting quirk is that in high-context cultures, the more educated and sophisticated you are, the greater your ability to both speak and listen with an understanding of implicit, layered messages. By contrast, in low-context cultures, the most educated and sophisticated business people are those who communicate in a clear, explicit way. The result is that the chairman of a French or Japanese company is likely to be a lot more high-context than those who work on the shop floor of the same company, while the chairman of an American or Australian organization is likely to be more low-context than those with entry-level jobs in the same organization. In this respect, education tends to move individuals toward a more extreme version of the dominant cultural tendency.
IT’S ALL RELATIVE
As we’ve noted, when considering the impact of cultural differences on your dealings with other people, what matters is not so much the absolute positioning of a person’s culture on a particular scale, but rather their relative positioning in comparison to you. The examples that follow illustrate how this principle applies to the Communicating scale.
Both Americans and British fall toward the low-context end of the Communicating scale. But the British speak more between the lines than Americans do, a tendency particularly apparent with British high-context humor. Many British people are fond of delivering ironic or sarcastic jokes with a completely deadpan face. Unfortunately, this kind of humor is lost on many Americans; they may suspect the British person is joking but they don’t dare laugh, just in case he is not.
As a result, the British often say that Americans “don’t understand irony.” However, a more precise explanation is that Americans are simply more low-context than the British. So when Americans make a joke, especially in a professional setting, they are likely to indicate clearly through explicit verbal or physical cues, “This is a joke,” something totally unnecessary when one British person is speaking to another. In their higher-context culture, if you have to tell us it was a joke, then it wasn’t worth the breath you used to tell it.
Alastair Murray, a British manager living in Dubai, offers this example:
I was participating in a long-distance bike race across the UAE desert with hundreds of participants. In order to be collegial, I took a turn riding in front of another biker in order to break the headwind for him and help him save a little energy. A stranger had recently done the same for me.
A little later the biker peddled up next to me and said in a thick American accent, “Thanks very much for your help!”
I replied, “Oh, sure! But I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known you were American.”
To someone British i
t would have been clear that this was a joke, and even a sort of gentle reaching-out of friendliness. But as I delivered it straight-faced and with a serious voice, the American didn’t seem to get it. He rode next to me in silence, beginning to pull slightly to the side.
So then I thought about how often Americans say “just kidding” after a joke. So I gave it a go. I told him, “Oh, hey, just kidding!”
And he responded, “Oh! All right! Ha ha! That was a good one. Where are you from?”
Oh, gosh, I thought. . . . these literal Americans!
The British may be more high-context than Americans—particularly where humor is concerned—but in comparison with Latin Europeans such as Spain and Italy and including the French they are very low-context.
I once worked with Stuart Shuttleworth, the CEO, owner, and founder of a small British investment firm that had grown over thirty years from a one-man shop into a company with one hundred employees. Two years earlier, he had begun expanding the business internationally. Shuttleworth explained to me the cultural quandaries this expansion had created for him:
Every day, as I see how my new counterparts work in Spain, France, and Italy, I am asking myself if it is possible that what is obvious common sense to me may not be common sense in those environments. Take, for example, the simple process of recapping a meeting. In the U.K., it is common sense that at the end of a meeting you should verbally recap what has been decided, which is most frequently followed by a written recap, including individual action items, which we send out to all meeting participants. Clarification, clarification, clarification—in the U.K. this is simply good business practice.
I attended a meeting the other day in Paris with a group of my France-based employees and one of our Parisian clients. As the meeting was clearly winding down, I awaited the final “Here’s what we’ve decided” recap of the meeting. Instead, one of the clients announced dramatically “Et voilà!” [There it is!] as if everything had been made clear. The others all stood up patting one another on the back and shaking hands, stating words of appreciation and future collaboration.
