Edward T. and Mildred Reed Hall’s behavioral components of culture

Edward T. and Mildred Reed Hall’s behavioral components of culture

This couple argued that cultural communications are deeper and more complex than spoken or written messages and so the essence of effective cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing the right responses than with sending the right messages. They offered some conceptual tools to help decipher the unspoken rules of each culture.

Context/ Fast and slow messages refer to “the speed with which a particular message can be decoded and acted on. Whereas in essence, it takes time to get to know people well (they are “slow messages”), in some cultures it takes less time to make friends than in others, easy familiarity is thus an example of a fast message. High and low contexts are concerned with the information surrounding an event.

According to Hall and Hall (1990), typical high context cultures include Japanese, Arab, and Mediterranean cultures with extensive information networks and involvement in many close personal relationships. As a result, little background information is required or expected in daily life. Misunderstandings can occur when different communication styles in terms of high and low context are not considered. A person with a low-context style, for example, may be perceived as talking too much, being overly precise, and providing unnecessary information by someone with a high-context style. In contrast, a person with a high-context style may be perceived as untrustworthy and uncooperative by someone with a low-context style.

Space/Territoriality refers to people's perceptions of space and the material things around them, and it is also a reelection of power.

Space/Personal space is the distance required to feel comfortable around other people. Personal space, according to the Halls, is a "bubble" that each person carries with them at all times. It changes size depending on the situation and the people with whom it interacts. A communication problem may simply arise from different interpretations of what the chosen physical distance to one another means.

Time/Monochronic and Polychronic Time relate to the organization of one's time. Working with monochronic timing means doing one thing at a time, working with schedules where one thing comes after the other, and where different tasks have their own time allotted to them. Polychronic timing means the opposite: many tasks are completed at the same time, and there is a high level of involvement with people, implying a greater emphasis on relating to others than on sticking to a schedule.