When a person from one culture sends a message to a person from a different culture, this process is known as intercultural communication (McDaniel, Samnovar & Porter, 2012). We interact with people from different cultures on a daily basis and therefore it is useful to have knowledge of the theories which develop our intercultural communication skills. Several of these concepts can be explained through stories relayed to me by my friend Victoria, who has experience working with Middle Eastern people after joining the Muslim community in 2014. More people should be made aware of theories such as Hofstede’s (2012) cultural dimensions, and Ting-Toomey 's (1999) staircase model in order to avoid cultural misunderstanding. Applying these concepts to understand Victoria’s experiences have also helped enlighten me about my own ethnic identity and cultural values.
Hofstede
Victoria is New Zealand born and raised but converted to the religion of Islam at the age of 18. She shared with me some stories about the main …show more content…
Prejudice is an attitude that combines both a person 's beliefs and their feelings towards a particular group of people (Hecht, as cited in Oetzel, 2009). It has three main components - Prejudgement, Prejudgement with evaluation and prejudgement with a negative evaluation (Oetzel, 2009). Prejudgement is when a person makes judgements based on the cultural group without knowing who the person is and what they will do (Oetzel, 2009). For example, the waiter saw the group of friends at the café and made his own judgements about who they were. Prejudgement with evaluation is when we decide whether the group is good or bad. So by making the decision to avoid serving them at first, the waiter had decided that the group were bad. Lastly, we negatively evaluate the other group to create distance between them and us (Oetzel, 2009). However, in this case, with the setting being a business, the waiter was forced to serve them in the
Hofstede
Victoria is New Zealand born and raised but converted to the religion of Islam at the age of 18. She shared with me some stories about the main …show more content…
Prejudice is an attitude that combines both a person 's beliefs and their feelings towards a particular group of people (Hecht, as cited in Oetzel, 2009). It has three main components - Prejudgement, Prejudgement with evaluation and prejudgement with a negative evaluation (Oetzel, 2009). Prejudgement is when a person makes judgements based on the cultural group without knowing who the person is and what they will do (Oetzel, 2009). For example, the waiter saw the group of friends at the café and made his own judgements about who they were. Prejudgement with evaluation is when we decide whether the group is good or bad. So by making the decision to avoid serving them at first, the waiter had decided that the group were bad. Lastly, we negatively evaluate the other group to create distance between them and us (Oetzel, 2009). However, in this case, with the setting being a business, the waiter was forced to serve them in the