How to make presentations to multicultural audiences
Posted by David Evans on Mon, Apr 11, 2011 @ 12:10 PM
by Carmen Taran
Psychology research often links attitudes and behaviors (attitudes being defined as a positive, negative, mixed, or indifferent reaction towards a person, object, or idea).
For instance, an attitude becomes stronger when it is associated with a corresponding behavior. If a person helps out a candidate during a political campaign, it is more likely that the person will vote for the candidate upon conclusion of the event. The strength or weakness of an attitude is generally determined by whether the issue is related to our self-interest - it is linked to our core values (religious, political, philosophical) or well being of those in our lives.
Presenting to Multicultural Audiences
If we hold enough information about a topic, we are also more likely to act out a specific attitude. If we know the benefits of exercise for instance, and have a strong attitude about it, we are more likely to engage in that behavior. If the information about this topic is obtained from personal experience (e.g. being on the tennis team in high school), it is more likely that exercise will be carried out because the source of information for the attitude towards exercise was obtained through our own means.
These thoughts about the link between attitudes and behaviours prompted me to take the idea further and relate it to presentation skills. If an attitude is a reaction towards a person, object, or idea, that means we can almost equate it to an emotion. And if that is the case, I am really interested how attitudes are displayed on our faces, especially if we come from different cultures. Could we predict, based on someone’s facial expression, whether they have a strong attitude about a topic and how they might act? Does this emotional display of attitudes differ from culture to culture?
Finding the answers would help tremendously if you were a presenter constantly striving to adjust delivery to audience reception, especially if you’re presenting to diverse listeners.
I recently read an article on this topic titled Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion” (Masuda et. al, 2006).
When studying facial expressions, the authors took into consideration the following aspects:
1. Attention to context. Western cultures tend to pay attend to focus points, while Eastern culture take into consideration the background.
2. Significance of social context. Western cultures pay attention to personal goals and strive for singularity, while Eastern cultures tend to see individuals as inseparable from the community and pay more attention to a collective consciousness.
3. Perception of emotions. Westerners tend to see emotions as personal reactions, related to the self. Their emotions are spontaneous, internal, and easy to display in public. People from the East on the other hand may have a harder time displaying personal emotions; theirs are more adapted to the group; the public display of personal emotions is not encouraged. In fact, if you showed a Japanese person a photograph, s/he would probably not be able to tell you what emotion was being displayed in the picture without a context.
It was interesting to note that in Western art, the individual in a portrait typically takes up most of the canvas space, where as in Eastern paintings, portraits are much smaller and people are more often simply part of the background.
In this particular study, the authors confirmed that, when asked to gage the emotions of people in pictures, Japanese talked about the emotions of the people in the background while Americans focused on the emotions expressed by the main subject alone. Japanese participants also mentioned that they were more likely to be influenced by changes in the background figures, whereas Western participants were not.
Consider these findings for any presentation you deliver to a multicultural audience. For instance, if you feel that you have a strong topic and good delivery, yet Eastern audiences do not react, you don’t need to doubt your skills. Or if you're not used to Western audiences who display their feelings in public, there's no need to not feel embarassed or insulted. The more you understand the links between your listeners’ attitudes and behaviors, the more confidence you can have in your delivery.
References
Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & Van de Veerdonk, E. (2006). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (3), pp.22-35.