Koreans expect their utterances to be understood implicitly within the context, as well as look for these meanings in others" speech, whereas Americans do not rely as heavily on context to convey their message. Americans use more direct, explicit phrases to communicate their meaning and look to the actual words and phrases to encode the meaning of utterances conveyed to them (Holtgraves, 1997). Koreans and Americans also differ in their motivation behind their use of politeness as an indirect strategy of communication. "Koreans [weight] power and distance more heavily than Americans" (Holtgraves, 1992: 155). As a result, Koreans use politeness to a greater extent when the hearer is more powerful or closer to the individual. On the other hand, Americans are less selective and less variable in their use of politeness. These three factors contribute to the differences in the extent to which members of a collective society like Korea use conversational indirectness, compared to those of a more individualistic society, like the United States.
Differences in styles of communicating have important implications for when members from each culture interact with each other. The high degree of indirectness used by Koreans would make it difficult for an American listener to grasp the intended meaning of a Korean speaker because he or she would not look for the hidden meanings present in the Korean speakers speech. The reverse is also true; a Korean listener would read more into a comment made by an American speaker than was actually present and intended in the speech itself. Furthermore, Americans may perceive the indirect conversation style of Koreans as cunning and manipulative, even though that is not the intention (Holtgraves, 1997). This would result in many misinterpretations and lost meanings for both participants and would make it difficult for them to truly understand what the other is trying to convey to them.
