Culture, Norms, and the Assessment of Communication Contexts: Discussion and Pointers for the Future

Abstract

The various papers in this special section have offered a range of perspectives on the complex nexus of culture, context, and norms. One of the main aims of this special section was to gain deeper insights into the role of context and so we start by reflecting on this aspect.Stanley and Fischer (this issue), on the basis of their findings, suggest that situations may have an impact on norm effects. Moreover, as Hogan (2009, p. 249) and Rauthmann et al. (2014, pp. 698-699) both point out, the key issue is people's perceptions of situations and the facets that are perceptually salient to them. Four of the papers in this special issue have thrown light on this:

Metapragmatic comments on relating across cultures

“…Within cross-cultural psychology, culture has traditionally been interpreted primarily as values, but there is increasing recognition of the conceptual and empirical limitations of this approach (Fischer and Schwartz 2011) and attention is increasingly turning to culture as norms and schematic knowledge (e.g. Leung and Morris 2015;Spencer-Oatey et al 2019;Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2020). In the latter two publications, the authors argue that participants' cultural patterning encompasses a range of elements in addition to cultural values, including conceptualisations of communicative activities, role responsibilities, and interactional norms.…”