individualism The concepts of collectivism and individualism have been applied to high- and low-context cultures by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede in his Cultural Dimensions Theory. Collectivist societies prioritize the group over the individual, and vice versa for individualist ones. In high-context cultures, language may be used to assist and maintain relationship-building and to focus on process. India and Japan are typically high-context, highly collectivistic cultures, where business is done by building relationships and maintaining respectful communication. Individualistic cultures promote the development of individual values and independent social groups. Individualism may lead to communicating to all people in a group in the same way, rather than offering hierarchical respect to certain members. Because individualistic cultures may value cultural diversity, a more explicit way of communicating is often required to avoid misunderstanding. Language may be used to achieve goals or exchange information. The USA and Australia are typically low-context, highly individualistic cultures, where transparency and competition in business are prized. Stability and durability of tradition High-context cultures tend to be more stable, as their communication is more economical, fast, efficient and satisfying; but these are gained at a price of devoting time into preprogramming cultural background, and their high stability might come with a price of a high barrier for development. By contrast, low-context cultures tend to change more rapidly and drastically, allowing extension to happen at faster rates. This also means that low-context communication may fail due to the overload of information, which makes culture lose its screening function. Therefore, higher-context cultures tend to correlate with cultures that also have a strong sense of tradition and history, and change little over time. For example, Native Americans in the United States have higher-context cultures with a strong sense of tradition and history, compared to general American culture. Focusing on tradition creates opportunities for higher-context messages between individuals of each new generation, and the high-context culture feeds back to the stability hence allows the tradition to be maintained. This is in contrast to lower-context cultures in which the shared experiences upon which communication is built can change drastically from one generation to the next, creating communication gaps between parents and children, as in the United States. Facial expression and gesture Culture also affects how individuals interpret other people's facial expressions. An experiment performed by the University of Glasgow shows that different cultures have different understanding of the facial expression signals of the six