HAPTIC AND SILENCE, CRUCIAL ASPECTS TO HAVE IN MIND WHEN INTERACTING WITH OTHERS.

When getting to communicate with others, there are two aspects that will always, or most of the times take place in the negotiation, dialogue or interaction; and assuming it in the wrong way will lead to conflict or uncomfortable situations. Based on this, I decided that “The silence” and “The haptic” are the most important topics of the class.  As we know the haptics can be mostly related to the behavior of the person that comes from the culture in which he or she grew up; the necessity to touch someone increase or decrease depending on the culture or the confidence between the people, but there is a common error that appear in the barriers to communication and it is assuming similarities, you cannot treat people from a different or a same culture, the way you treat your relatives or friends.  The haptics can mean many things as we said in class, affection, confident, need for attention, attachment, but also sexual content; I will like to highlight an example based on the Tv show “Outsourced: Touch of an Anglo” that talk about an internationalized firma located in India with a American boss (Todd)that do not know anything about this culture, for him touching the others was a pretty normal and friendly action, but he didn’t realize that in India, touching the shoulder has a sexual content and can be very offensive, his bigger problem was assuming the similarity with the American culture, and due to this situation he was almost fired.  

As the professor Peter Andersen says "A person who touches a lot says, 'I'm a friendly, intimate person.' More touch-oriented doctors, teachers, and managers get higher ratings."

(Rick Chillot, march 11, 2013. www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201302/the-power-touch)

I do agree that touching can help improve a relation, and also give a nicer or warmer perception or image of the person, but, is important always to have in mind the concept of proxemics, that is known as the personal space, and that is also related to the culture.

In the other hand the silence can play a big role when interacting with others, as this action can have lots of meanings.  “Silence grants the point or Silence implies or gives consent”, when someone prefer or decide not to say something, the other can get into many conclusions, maybe this person agree or disagree about my idea, or maybe is confuse, or  embarrass, or it’s just a way to show me respect; that may  end with a feeling of insecurity in the “Receptor”. But how a person can deal or handle the silence? This is a complex question, due to all the implicit possibilities that it implies; the best way will be to stop assuming things, or trying to wonder or figure out what the other wanted to say by the “silence”, and this is due to the tendency of assuming negative messages, which can lead to misunderstandings, because “Discomfort lies in uncertainty”. If you don’t know what the other mean by keeping the silence, just ask what they want to transmit by doing it. 

 (Peter Bregman, January 19, 2010. http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/01/how-to-handle-silence-the-wors/)

For my research question I found really interesting the development model of intercultural sensitivity that is related to ethnocentrism, the other reason is that I was a little confuse about this topic because of the quality of the slide and the short time it was due. So I will like to go deeper in the study of this model, that is used in an international way to help training intercultural relations and that way, facilitate the assess to an intercultural competence; to start it was created by Dr. Milton Bennett (1986 - 1993), which is the founder of the ICI, known as the Intercultural Communication Institute, and also of the IDRI, also known as the Intercultural Development Research Institute, that help to the deep and extended research of the intercultural development, and therefore facilitate the  intercultural adaptation.

(Head&Hands, http://www.idrinstitute.org/page.asp?menu1=2&menu2=3)

He created this model with the purpose to explain the way the people react or respond to the differences that each culture possesses. When the relation or interaction increases, then this “relationship” will make this difference of culture complex. The three first stages will be related to the ethnocentrism, leading to the stages of “Denial, the avoidance of other cultures, because they are seen as different or abnormal”, “Defense, the tendency to critic in a highly way the people from other cultures, creating a status where there is a superior culture and therefore an inferior one.” and “Minimization, the trivialization of the culture, which look for the correction or adjustment of  the others behaviors to look for similarities and that way to reach their ideals”. The second three stages will be related to the ethnorelative, and with this stages comes the “Acceptance, the necessity of understanding the differences in a culture, due to the increase of interaction with others”, the “Adaptation, the interaction with a different culture, will help improve or even change in some way the perception and/ or behavior of the existing one to adapt easily “ and finally the “Integration,  the total inclusion into the new culture, caused by a feeling of union and equality”. 

(AFS-USA, Inc. http://www.afsusa.org/schools/global-classroom/spring-2011/intercultural-sensitivity/)