Communicating information in conversations: A cross-cultural comparison

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study was to compare the amount of infor-mation sent by the speaker, received and retrieved by the listener in inter- and intra-cultural conversations. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) in their conversa-tions, inter-cultural interactants would communicate significantly less information than intra-cultural interactants with other variables held constant, (2) the two inter-cultural conditions would not be dierent from each other in terms of the amount of information communicated, and the same would be true with the two intra-cultural conditions, and (3) in their conversations, the speakers in inter-cul-tural conditions would send the same amount of information as speakers in intra-cultural conditions given that all speakers would pass a test on the materials they were going to present. Participants were 40 Canadian and 40 Chinese university students, and they were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental con-ditions. Each dyad engaged in two medical conversations, which were videotaped upon the consent of the participants. The nature of the conversations resembled physician-patient face-to-face interactions. Results from written tests immediately following the conversations provided strong support for Hypothesis 1 and 2, and results from viewing the videotapes provided partial support for Hypothesis 3. In relation to the amount of information sent by the speakers, listeners in inter- and intra-cultural conditions retrieved only 50 % and 75 % of the information respect-ively. Based on the findings, one may argue that inter-cultural communication dif-fers significantly from intra-cultural communication in the amount of informatio