Non verbal communication Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Non verbal communication - Term Paper Example appearance. In this technique, I would just wear the clothes of cultures different from my own and see how this affects my experience of communication in a multicultural setting. In this paper, I have shared the results and have discussed in which experiments, this technique enhanced my ability to communicate across cultures and why. Rationale Today, we live in an increasingly multicultural and globalized world. Every day, we get to meet and socialize with people from backgrounds of many cultural varieties. Lack of foreign languages certainly hinders our ability to communicate across cultures. But at the same time, the importance of social networking across cultures in the contemporary age cannot be overstated. Be it school, office, or a restaurant, we have to encounter and communicate with people from other cultures and retreating from this is simply not an option. While verbal communication in the inter-cultural setting has been a much studied subject, the non-verbal communication in an inter-cultural setting remains a passive subject of research although it is no less important than the verbal communication. ... The researchers found that the research participants were more likely to identify the pictures of smiling people who were of their own ethnicity as compared to the pictures of people from other ethnicities. â€Å"People tend to favor a member of the in-group over an out-group member when distributing positive outcomes such as rewards to others†. 1 It so happens because of the fact that â€Å"[c]ulture strongly influences, and in many cases determines, our interpretations†.2 The famous Indian political leader Jawaharlal Nehru also emphasized upon developing an understanding of different cultures to be able to communicate better across cultures. â€Å"If we seek to understand a people, we have to try to put ourselves, as far as we can, in that particular historical and cultural background†¦If we wish to convince them, we have to use their language as far as we can, not language in the narrow sense of the word, but the language of the mind. That is one necessity† (Nehru cited in3). Adler states that there are certain non-verbal behaviors that can facilitate the conveyance of meaning between two or more people from different cultural backgrounds that include visual restatements, gestures, demonstration, pauses, and summaries. Description of my experiments For this research, I conducted three experiments in total in three different settings, one of which was a school, the other was a clothes’ shop, and the third was a wedding ceremony. One thing that was common between them was that all three were multicultural settings. Experiment 1 I conducted this experiment in my school on an event when students were allowed to dress up in the outfits of their