Chapter 9 of our textbook discusses the implications of intercultural communication on ethics. On page 160, the authors discuss how success means different things across cultures. I can relate to this personally through recent experience. A couple of weeks ago I was discussing the upcoming spring semester registration with one of friends, who is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. I was telling my friend that I was thinking about registering for a particular class, and he told me that I should perhaps reconsider taking that class because he had read some bad reviews of professors on Ratemyprofessor.com. I told him that I never really took into consideration who was teaching a class when I registered for it because I felt that success in a class depended more on how much work you put into it than who was teaching it. He was shocked because for him, who was teaching a class and what his peers thought of that teacher was important to him when registering for classes.
Although it is hard for me to say definitively whether this understanding of what will make you successful in a class is a difference in cultures across countries or just a difference in cultures across study habits, I don’t think that it is too infeasible to suggest that this difference is likely a result of growing up in a culture that really values the input of friends and reputation (the Dominican Republic) versus growing up in a culture that values individual effort more than anything else (the United States). The valuation of success based on who you are being taught by versus how much individual work you put into a course is an example of intercultural communication ethics because it stresses the need to understand the influence of different cultures on people. As our authors discuss in the chapter, it is important to gain “…insight into how different cultures view the term success and how unlike understandings carry with them differing views of the good” (Arnett et al., 2009, p.160 [emphasis in original]).
That was an interesting point about ratemyprofessor. I've had the same conversations with some of my friends, I have never used it and they are always shocked when I say that because they rely on that website so much. In my own experience, I've found that this difference impacts the communication between me and my friends when we do discuss this subject matter. When one of us starts to talk about classes we never can get anywhere in the conversation because we each have different ideas on how classes should be picked. For my example, we are both from the United States, so it would be interesting to see where our narratives differ.
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