Can food be worth more than a thousand words? Nonverbal and intercultural communicative competence for tourism promotion

The main purpose of communication is persuasion, as sender and receiver try to influence one another to make one's point of view prevail on the other. In intercultural contexts of communication, differences between the counterparts mostly derive from their different cultural backgrounds (Vasta 1999).

There might be extreme situations in which such differences could lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.
An example is the start of the first Gulf War in 1991: during a meeting between the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, and the US Secretary of State, James Baker, a message misinterpretation due to cultural differences led to the outbreak of the conflict. Even Saddam Hussein's brother, who had not English language competences and had just few contacts with members of the Western culture, attended the meeting. As Baker stated that the United States would have invaded Iraq if Saddam's army would not have withdrawn, he did it with a calm and quiet tone of voice, and the threat was not perceived by Hussein's brother. That happened because the collectivistic Arab culture is high-context and tends to focus more on the environment than on the message in itself. Moreover, relationships with close relatives and friends are highly valued and it is therefore possible that Saddam Hussein focused more on his brother's words and report of the meeting, than on that of his Foreign Minister; as a result, according to that report, there was no need to worry about the American reaction to Kuwait invasion.
This example shows that intercultural misunderstandings are related to cultural distance (Triandis 2012, 34; Vasta 1999): the greater the distance between culture, the higher the likelihood of misunderstandings happening.

There are four main factors that influence cultural distance: spoken language, social structure (e.g. family structure), religion (which affects judgments on others: individuals are brought to think that others share the same values, world-views, attitudes, behaviors, etc., i.e. the false consensus bias) and life standards.
When communication meets cultural differences, it becomes a way of sharing specific meanings and values between the counterparts; meanings and values are encoded into a system, which is different from culture to culture, which is essential to live effectively in a specific cultural environment. Triandis (2012, 36-39) suggests an additional way of culture classification, sharing some common grounds with Hofstede's dimensional model.
Triandis' model is based on nine dimensions called cultural syndromes, which affect communication and can lead to conflicts, and it is more related to the behavior of individuals during the communicative process. […]