Differences between Sino- American Cultural Values from Intercultural Communication Perspective

Abstract

With the globalization, intercultural communication has become inevitable experience for Chinese people who are embracing people all over the world in her strive for modernization and internationalization. Cultural differences have become great obstacles to intercultural communication. Cultural value is the core of shared perceptions, existing only in the minds of people, which provides a norm of behaving, thinking, recognizing, socializing, deducing, evaluating, and make people orient themselves to it. On the basis of the framework of value orientations by Kluckhohn and Stodtbeck, this paper attempts to make a contrastive analysis of differences of Sino-American cultural values, provides insights into the virtues bases of Sino-American cultural values, i.e., Chinese five cardinal virtues and Western four cardinal virtues, explores the influences of cardinal virtues on value dimensions by Hofstede, proposes implications to intercultural communication in order to overcome potential barriers caused by cultural differences. As a qualitative study, this paper adopts the methods of consulting relative materials and makes a comparative analysis in order to promote mutual understanding between Chinese and Americans.