Comment by caminante
2 years ago
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.
Good point on nuance on a technical level, i.e., debunked != failure to support relationship.
However, on a practical level, people throw this around as if it were empirically supported (which doesn't seem to be the case). If there have been hundreds of studies failing to make the connection, I won't take the bet that it will eventually get validated.
On a meta-level, that's also a weird quote.
> But the fact that contexting has not been empirically validated should not necessarily be construed as a failure of the theory
Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, and plenty of people have tried to validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right?
> Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right?
Definitely not. There are a ton of theories that are very difficult to validate because you simply can't run the experiment due to practical or ethical reasons. That doesn't mean they are invalid.
For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to ever run a real UBI experiment.
Or the theory that eugenics would decrease genetic illnesses. Good luck testing that!
Even a lot of basic and fairly self evident stuff is difficult to actually prove when it involves people. Are the gender biases of children (toy preferences etc) innate? They definitely are but it's very difficult to actually test.
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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.
I agree.
I was critiquing the parent and indirectly asking for an example of a firm that has *ONLY* "high context." Things become very abstract with unwritten rules as you move up the org chart.