2.1 Formation of cultural empathy

2.1.1 Inevitability of cultural empathy

Cultural commonality makes it possible to achieve empathy, while cultural persity and cultural differences make empathy become an inevitable occurrence in cross-cultural communication. On the one hand, all humans in society have the same basic physical needs, that is, to survive and multiply, which are the basic functions of society. Humans have driving force to find cultural universality between different cultures, that is, “the unity of the human psyche.” So, it’s entirely possible for people from different cultural backgrounds to achieve empathy in communication. On the other hand, cultural differences of human beings exist objectively. It is because of cultural persity and cultural differences that culture exhibits its richness and vividness and shows the vitality in its development. Cultural persity can promote competition between different cultures, prompt people to see the strengths that they should learn from in foreign cultures, and induce people’s inspiration. Without cultural persity and differences, there is no rich and innovative culture, nor the necessity of cultural empathy. Communication subjects with different cultural backgrounds own their personality traits in the cultural orientation, values, religion, ethics, ways of thinking, lifestyle, etc. This makes them different in the ways of encoding and decoding information, verbal and non-verbal behavior, the rules of using language, and discourse structure. These differences make people get rid of the influence of mindset formed by local cultural heritage and make people break their cognitive psychological projection and experience on the perspective of others. This is just what we called effective cultural empathy.