Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

It happened last summer, when I went back to my hometown in China for holiday. I got together with my High-school class mates at KTV, and we spent a great time there. By the time we left, one of the gentlemen class mates paid the bill. It was 250yuan in total and there were 5 of us, so I passed him 50yuan subconsciously. He did not accept the money, but stared at me and asked: ‘What do you mean?’ I could tell, from his tone, that he was angry about me! Other friends also stared at me as if I was a stranger to them. I then realized that I made a mistake by breaking the Chinese culture!

In China, people treasure friendship and they believe in “share and share alike(有福同享，有难同当).” So when some friends eat or play outside, they would like to treat each other to show close friendship. Usually, one friend would pay the bill for all; another would pay next time, so on and so forth. They don’t care about gain and lost with friends and don’t “go Dutch”. So when I paid my friend 50yuan for myself, I hurt them by being “clear” with them.

For the first time, in my hometown, I experienced the difference in culture norms and values. After 4 years staying in Singapore, I am used to the western culture here. For Singaporeans, go Dutch with friends is very common. Being “clear” with money doesn’t mean being far away from friends. Instead, it avoids a lot of troubles caused by money, which makes the friendship more sincere. I appreciate it and enjoy “go Dutch” with friends even when I went back to China. But my carelessness hurt my friends. It reminded me again, that the fundamental rule of intercultural communication is to respect each other with their culture.

Potential Research Project Proposal

Nowadays, environmental problem has become a global issue; saving natural resource by recycling is promoted as the responsibility of every citizen. Therefore, the recycling bins are “invited “into NUS. There are two kinds of recycling bins—yellow bins are for cans recycling and green bins are for paper. We believe that if everyone would recycle his (her) daily recyclable garbage, day after day, we will save a lot of natural resource. However, things do not go as well as they are expected. Some students throw everything into garbage bins, as if they can’t see the recycling bins; some don’t bother to separate cans from paper, but throw them into the recycling bin whichever is near to them; some even throw food or tissue paper into recycling bins which gives the cleaners a big trouble. Based on this problem, we would like to conduct a research to find out the usage level of recycling bins among NUS students.

An attitudinal survey is necessary in this case because we want to know the percentage of students who use recycling bins; for those who don’t, what are the reasons? Is that because they don’t they believe in recycling, or they don’t bother to separate recyclable from unrecyclable garbage but simply throw everything in garbage bins. On top of that, we want to find out how many students use recycling bins correctly. We will ask a couple of questions to test their knowledge level of recyclable items, for example, are food and tissue paper recyclable? The analyzed data will be reflected to Office of Student’s Affair (OSA) for further implementation.