Why Intercultural Communications Matters: Sharing Better Stories

When you think of Atlantic City, New Jersey, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? The beach? The boardwalk? Gambling? Failing casinos? Hurricane damage? Economic decline? Like many places, Atlantic City is often defined by its challenges, but the story of this seaside city runs much deeper than any one of these flattened facets.

To widen narrow perceptions, Stories of Atlantic City brings together community, media, and folks in higher education to share untold stories about the city and its people. Using a strengths-based approach called restorative narrative, the project uses journalism and storytelling to tell deeper stories of people and communities experiencing adversity and taps into their strength and resilience to cope and grow. Through this approach, Atlantic City becomes a multifaceted web of resilient restaurants, intergenerational uplift, connective cyclists, comic book creatives, and so much more.?

“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become,” says novelist Chimamanda Adichie in her 2009 TED Talk. “Single stories create stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

How can we ward off the dangers of the single story? And how can we be more restorative in our storytelling and story-sharing? Intercultural communication offers us an antidote – a concrete way to complicate the narrative and push ourselves to expand our horizons and understanding of ourselves and others. It offers us a way to frame our approach to ensure we share better stories – stories grounded in respect, care, and equity.?

Who is your audience, really?

Oftentimes in the sphere of advocacy, activism, and issue-oriented communications, individuals and organizations want to mobilize people to act, to change behavior, or to change society at large. To do so requires us to connect with a wide range of people – people with different beliefs, backgrounds, upbringings, faiths, etc. In other words, people from different cultures. To be successful, communicators need to have what researchers Brian H. Spitzberg and Gabrielle Changnon term as intercultural competence – the knowledge, motivation, and skills to interact across cultures in ways that are effective and appropriate.

The first step towards intercultural competence? Know your audience. In the Back of the Envelope Guide to Communication Strategy, authors Anne Christiano and Annie Neimand illustrate how you not only need to know who you need to activate for change, you also need to know what will make them care. Understanding your audience is about more than demographic characteristics. It’s about understanding what makes them tick; our culture playing a major role.

As Erin Meyer, author of The Culture Map, explains there are significant differences between high context and low context cultures. In a low context culture, it’s assumed that we all do not share the same reference points and that we need to be very explicit about what is being discussed. She offers the example of a German colleague who describes how at the end of each meeting, he provides both a verbal and written recap of what was discussed. By contrast, high context cultures are more nuanced.

“In a high context society, we assume or consider that we have a larger body of shared context; that we have the same reference points, body of knowledge, and information,” she says in a 2014 video. “And because we assume we have all this shared context we believe that good communication is communication that is more implicit or layered.”??

At the same time, cultures can also differ in the value given to individuals or the group. In individualist cultures, individuals can choose their own goals and act accordingly, while in collectivist cultures, priority is given to the greater group over individual choice.

Understanding the contextual orientation of an audience can help communicators determine how explicit or ambiguous they should be in delivering their messages. What will your audience expect? What will resonate? Unpacking the individualistic or collectivist nature of an audience can help communicators pick the right messengers (an underdog or an authority figure?) and which conventional story archetype will resonate or repel.?

Find common ground

Whether you are working on the local, regional, national or international level, it can be challenging to advance causes where there appears to be a wide gulf between opposing sides. Intercultural communication reinforces that despite our many cultural differences, we do operate with some level of common ground.

American anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck’s Values Orientation Theory proposes that all human societies must answer a limited number of universal problems related to time, nature and each other. They suggest that these value-based solutions are limited in number and universally known, but that different cultures have different preferences among them.

This theory was put into practice in Ireland, where organizers working for marriage equality successfully used shared values to bridge divides.

“Our communications started with values,” said Grainne Healy, co-director of the “Yes Equality” campaign, in a story by The Communications Network. “Our research told us that the electorate believed in love, equality, fairness, generosity, and being inclusive. These were what it meant to be Irish.”?Rather than focus on sexual orientation, the campaign centered its strategy and approach around engaging people in positive conversations, often at the one-on-one level, about their values.

They leaned into what intercultural communication scholar Stella Ting-Toomey defines as mindful intercultural communication, creating a feeling of “being understood, supported, and respected” in the individual(s) with whom one is communicating. Similarly, their methods aligned with David Kale’s universal code of ethics which asserts that “ethical communicators address people of other cultures with the same respect that they would like to receive themselves.”

In May 2015, Irish voters overwhelmingly voted to change the constitution to allow marriage “by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” In doing so, Ireland became the first country to legalize marriage for same-sex couples by popular vote and did so with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Stay curious and put people-first

The Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) articulated by author W. Barnett Pearce describes communication as a social process. In this way, we derive meaning from the overall pattern of the interactions we have, not from any one single communication. Pearce further argues that mystery, or an innate curiosity, is vital for effective intercultural communication.

“Mystery directs our attention to the fact that the universe is far bigger and subtler than any possible set of stories that we might develop," he writes. "Whatever we think, there’s more to it than that; it’s not a riddle to be solved but a mystery to explore.”

When approaching others, Pearce suggests that we:

• Treat all stories, your own as well as others, as incomplete, unfinished, biased, and inconsistent.
• Treat your own stories as “local,” dependent on your own perspective, history, and purposes.
• Treat stories that differ from your own as “valid” within the framework of the other person’s perspective, history, and purposes.
• Be curious about other people’s stories.

In the April 2022 issue of Free-range Thinking, a newsletter from The Goodman Center, communicators Andy Goodman and Kirsten Farrell take this a step further and share how the concrete practice of asset framing can ensure the stories we share spark curiosity and connection.

While deficit framing puts problems first, asset framing puts people first. Goodman and Farrell share a quote from Trabian Shorters, an expert and advocate for asset framing. Shorters defines asset framing as “a narrative model that defines people by their assets and aspirations before noting the challenges and deficits.” With this construction, stories introduce the protagonist (i.e. who the story is about) as a person with accomplishments, hopes, and values before getting to the challenges they face.

And as we’ve learned from projects like Stories of Atlantic City, each story matters. Woven together, stories become narratives – powerful forces that shape our perceptions and decision-making.

The waves model for deep narrative change, above, by the Narrative Initiative illustrates how narratives are driven by deeper currents of values and worldview and made visible through messages and stories.         

“Every person has a whole story before they meet us,” Goodman and Farrell write. “They have aspirations and accomplishments, they have values, things and people they love. That’s how we should get to know them. Before the inciting incident. Before the barriers. Because you want the audience to see themselves in this person. Because you want them to feel compelled to act. Because you are striving to create empathy, not pity. And because it’s also better storytelling.”

This article is the second in a three-part series on the impact of effective intercultural communication, written for my final project for Foundations of Intercultural Communication, a master’s degree course at the University of Florida. Learn more about the Global Strategic Communication certificate program and the master’s program in Public Interest Communication.?