Influences Of Self-construal In Intercultural Communication

With the rapid development of transportation and communication technology, our human beings are in a new era of globalization; intercultural communication is very common. Smooth intercultural communication plays an important role as a bridge. However, people from different cultures show different cultural backgrounds, which can easily cause barriers to and conflicts of intercultural communication. In the previous studies, the differences between individualism and collectivism, the core of cultural values, have been the research focus on intercultural communication, while the factors on individual-level have always been neglected and the research methods cannot be measured accurately. The purpose of this thesis is to do researches on intercultural communication by employing the self-construal conception proposed in psychology on individual-level.Cases analysis and questionnaires are applied in this study. Questionnaires have been distributed to 215 Chinese students in U.S., who form and conduct a cultural system from not only Chinese culture but also American culture, ensuring the researcher to observe them from the perspectives of intercultural communication. Questionnaires are designed to assess the acculturation index of participants and the changeability of the self-construal in intercultural communication. Results show individuals have both an independent and interdependent self-construal pattern, but not only the exact one of the two self-construal patterns. Due to the different cultural backgrounds, either self-construal pattern tends to be more dominant. Individual's self-construal pattern will vary in the cultural acculturation process. Based on previous research fruits, this study firstly analyzes the influence of independent and interdependent self-construal in different cultures and the changeability of self-construal patterns in the cultural acculturation process, and then illustrates positive and negative influences of self-construal patterns, and the negative influences are the causes of barriers to intercultural communication. In this study, intercultural communication and its barriers are investigated by self-construal, which is put forward as an accurate variable to explain intercultural communication from the perspective of individual-level. Self-construal shows a dynamic system of intercultural communication, instead of a concept of viewing the situation as a whole and static state like individualism-collectivism. The self-construal will broaden the scope of the study area and enrich the intercultural psychology, providing researchers with some theoretical and methodological improvements from the perspective of individualism-collectivism dimension.