Building Bridges through the Unspoken: Embodied Agents to Facilitate Cross-Cultural Communication
Vienna Workshop "Agent Culture", 24-25 August 2001
Katherine Isbister, Ph.D.
Finali Corporation
It comes as no surprise to this audience, that we are increasinglycollaborating and communicating in our everyday lives, with peoplefrom other cultures. We face many challenges in bridging ourdifferences to make strong connections. Even when we learn oneanothers' language, we find there are many other barriers tocommunication--our culture shapes not only the words we use, but alsomany other qualities of our communication. One vastly important areais the nonverbal communication that accompanies speech--gestures, thedistance between us when we speak, the length of pauses and thecadence of turn-taking in speech, and so forth. Some anthropologists,in fact, "consider nonverbal skills as far more important than verbalskills in determining communication success abroad" (Almaney andAlway, 1982). Although researchers agree that there are some primaryemotions that are universally recognized (Ekman's work is the classicline of research), they also agree that cultures widely vary in the'display rules' about when one should display an emotion, and howstrongly. And,there are expressions that seem to exist only incertain cultures. When it comes to speech pauses, gestures, eyecontact, proximity to one another, and many other factors,researchers have demonstrated that cultures have widely divergentnorms. A foreign person who engages with locals will be judgedimplicitly by these norms. Even though locals may allow for lack ofknowledge; still these errors cause awkwardness as well as seriousmiscommunications.
Learning these norms is an important part of becoming a goodcross-cultural communicator. And yet (at least in the United States),nonverbal training is not typically a formal part of languagelearning. Even in corporate training for relocation to othercountries, one receives only very general instruction in thedifferences one needs to watch for. What is needed is explanation ofspecific patterns, preferably with an opportunity to practice andlearn.
I believe embodied interface agents are an excellent mediumthrough which to expose and educate people about cross-culturaldifferences in nonverbal communication. It's possible with currenttechnology, to design interface agents that can freely switch betweencultural norms of behavior, allowing people to observe, and topractice and truly understand and feel the variations in nonverbalcommunication. With the current state of the art in facial expressionas well as body articulation, interface agents are now quite ready tosupport this application. Watching the same animated agent performone set of cultural cues then another, could really help to makeclear and isolate the differences between the cultures. Also, seeingthe same agent perform both sets, would help to prevent attributionof these difference to some sort of personal idiosynchracy of theindividual observed. Watching multiple agents perform culturallyspecific behaviors with one another, would allow people to see thepatterns of action and reaction more clearly.
In my paper, I will discuss several different areas of culturallyspecific nonverbal communication differences, and present someconcepts for how interface agents might help people become attunedto, and even better able to generate culturally appropriate nonverbalcues.