Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 157

In an effort to blunt “the culture effect,” educators in some conflict-ridden societies use textbooks that encourage students to synthesize conflicting versions of events rather than choose one side. For example, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East published a booklet that divided pages into three columns, one for the Israeli version of history, one for the Palestinian version, and one left blank for the student to fill in.⁵⁸

Misunderstandings may result, however, when the cultures of interacting parties cause them to operate according to different assumptions and rules. For example, North Americans perceive talk as desirable. They value directness and are apt to perceive someone who fails to “tell it like it is” either as vague or cowardly. In contrast, members of Asian cultures place more value on silence, believing that one who understands need not speak. From the Asian standpoint, a person who states the obvious is a show-off. When we fail to realize that we have not all absorbed the same cultural lessons, cultural nearsightedness—the failure to understand that not all of us attribute the same meanings to behavioral cues—can cause us to misread signs and miss opportunities to use the differences between us to perceive one another more clearly.