Culture Or Fluency? Unpacking Interactions Between Culture And Communication Medium

In this paper we describe two studies intended to replicate earlier work comparing American and Chinese communication in a negotiation task using several different media. In the earlier studies, the participants all spoke in English, raising the question of whether differences in fluency rather than differences in cultural background explained the results. We replicated the earlier studies using materials translated into Chinese, a native Chinese-speaking experimenter, and native Chinese participants. Counts of Chinese characters in each media show nearly the identical pattern found in the earlier studies, suggesting that cultural differences in communication styles, rather than fluency, account for the earlier findings. We describe implications of this work for tools to support intercultural communication.