Cultural Empathy In Intercultural Communication

Today, the vast social and cultural diversity has formed the current context for intercultural communication. While encountering with each other, people will inevitably face the barriers, arising from cultural variations in cognition, worldview, value, customs, communication styles, which will lead to cultural misunderstanding and even communication breakdowns. Given the complexity of culture, an issue for people engaged in intercultural communication to consider is how one searches for common ground to understand each other's unique cultural value or worldview. Through the analysis of cultural barriers resulting from cultural differences, and the exploration of effectiveness of cultural empathy in intercultural communication, this paper attempts to propose that these cultural barriers can be reconciled by helping people develop an empathic response capable of transcending cultural differences, and then offer a proposed framework guiding the development and employment of cultural empathy in intercultural communication.This thesis is composed of three chapters apart from an introduction and a conclusion.Chapter One is a general review of the definitions and features of empathy in different disciplines, with particular attention directed to the exploration of the development of empathy in intercultural communication. Originating centuries ago from the German word "Einfühlung", empathy was introduced by Theodore Lipps within the field of aesthetics, which meant understanding others by projecting oneself into the object of beauty or by inner imitation. Later, it was translated by E.G. Tichener for the affective sharing of emotions. With the development of the concept, two important components, cognitive and communicative elements, have been identified and added to the defining of empathy, thus to form a multidimensional and comprehensive understanding of empathy. As a form of knowing or understanding about another's experience, empathy has three fundamental features. It is a unique human endowment, which builds positive social relationship and fosters good communication interaction. Due to these underlying features, many scholars have examined its role in intercultural communication. Theoretically, it has been argued to be an important factor and communicative skill for intercultural communication. Chapter Two mainly explores the barriers in intercultural communication, and proposes that empathy may prove to be an effective means for overcoming those cultural barriers so as to achieve mutual understanding between people of different cultural backgrounds. The general goal of effective intercultural communication is to create shared meanings between dissimilar individuals in an interactive situation. However, while engaged in intercultural communication, confined by their own cultural systems, people will feel difficult to understand each other well due to the different worldview, value system, and etc. All these differences between them can potentially lead to misunderstanding. Difference in worldview is one of the aspects which cause barriers in intercultural communication. Worldviews reveal how distinct cultural groups tend to experience the world in different ways and, they may vary from individual to individual and even from culture to culture. Thus conflict between individuals from different cultural groups is often a result of differences in their concept of worldview and more specifically in the different dimensions of worldviews. If both of the two parties began communication from the point of view of themselves, the communication would break down. The unconscious or conscious refusal to accept the other's culture and perspectives will hinder us from effective communication with others. Therefore, it is critical for people to learn to be effective with communicators from different cultural backgrounds. Cultural empathy has been proposed in this thesis as a general skill or attitude that can bridge the cultural gap between communicators across cultures. Cultural empathy is not only...