Comment by jedberg
2 years ago
Yes, it's just another name for that.
But this article paints high-context as bad and low-context as good, when they're really just different (and opposite ends of a spectrum, not a black or white one or another).
2 years ago
Yes, it's just another name for that.
But this article paints high-context as bad and low-context as good, when they're really just different (and opposite ends of a spectrum, not a black or white one or another).
Does it? That's not what I got from the article at all.
The author is from a "guess" culture trying to operate in an "ask" culture world. She's adapting, but not because any particular culture is better than the other, but because "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".
Multiple times it mentions that "guess culture" is frustrating and difficult, and that she and her brother prefer ask culture because it's easier.
"Ask" culture is prevalent in places where people come from diverse backgrounds. Cultures might also not be uniformely "ask" or "guess" across all topics. Therefore, when people with different value systems and communication cultures meet, "guess" culture simply doesn't work because other person's needs and intentions are often unexpected.
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It's definitely bad in a work context where clear and effective communication is important.
You're probably thinking "but implicit communication is just as effective!" but it definitely isn't. It's all about hints and guessing motivations which is inevitably unreliable.
These are always fun "pop-sci" discussions, but the wiki says this whole dichotomy has been debunked [0].
I can't think of any company that doesn't have some low-context interfaces. It can be expensive for top executives to constantly address every question with "clear and effective communication." Some people make it look easy, but it's hard!
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context...
Your link doesn't say "this whole dichotomy has been debunked." From one of the sources:
Which explicitly does not debunk it, but states that it's not empirically validated. That doesn't mean it's incorrect, although it could be.
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I think what makes the topic complicated is that the high vs low context dichotomy is actually split across multiple dimensions rather than being an overarching single dimension.
For example, in educated coastal-liberal California asking for favors or for hospitality (eg can I get a glass of water) is low context but certain topics like religion or most politically controversial things are generally off limits. Conversely in the South, hospitality has a decent number of high context expectations, but religion or political discussion are more acceptable for discussion. And of course every culture has common cultural/historical references that are implicitly known and sometimes implicitly referenced without explicitly making the reference or expanding on all the details.
That’s why I think a lot of cultures see themselves as low context compared to others, except perhaps the most pathologically high context ones (Japan), because we all have blind spots about where we’re actually high context.
I worked at an Indian tech consulting firm. Even though India is considered a high context culture, our working environment felt fully low context with endless meetings trying to get all stakeholders on the same page, clearing out assumptions, nailing down timelines and aligning resources. When I moved to a normal US company it felt like downright mind reading how we got shit done much faster because we did have a much larger shared context. So it's all relative and I bet American culture feels like high context to others, and those guys are astonished we can work without more hashing out than we do.
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Mm, not necessarily all work contexts IMO, I just think it’s particularly helpful in software because software itself is highly semantic and software teams tend to not all come from the same exact background.
If you were doing something like sales, where both all your salesmen and clients were locals with the same social expectations on how to communicate implicitly, there wouldn’t be any direct benefits to trying to communicate explicitly, and doing so may come across as rude or offensive.