Do you see what I see? A cross-cultural study on interpretation of clothing as a non-verbal signal

Abstract

To understand human social behavior, it is crucial to pay attention to non-verbal communication signals. Clothes are one of the non-verbal signals which inevitably transmit social signals and clothes are closely related to self-representation; therefore they can be used to make a desired impression. Clothes are also part of culture and each culture develops its own fashion of appearance and symbols of agreed meaning. Due to globalization, people all over the world now have wider and more similar choices of clothes than before. There is much research investigating the role that clothing plays in nonverbal communication, however, previous studies have employed positivist, quantitative methodologies and have neglected the role that culture might play. The aim of this study is to understand how people from two different cultural backgrounds (China and Sweden) interpret messages communicated through clothing. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with two groups representative of high-context and low-context cultures. The interviews used photographs as visual stimuli to achieve photo elicitation. Grounded theory was employed in the analysis of data from the interviews. The results gathered from the interview data suggest that both high-context and low-context cultures have the ability for interpreting clothes as non-verbal signals and attach meanings to them in similar ways. Implicit communication in terms of clothing is not a monopoly of high-context cultures. Difference decoding patterns existed which subsequently call for further research.