1.3 Research questions and hypotheses

Based on the above reasoning，the following research questions are raised：

RQ1：How has the concept of culture been approached in the field of intercultural communication？

RQ2：What are the philosophical foundations of diverse approaches to culture in the field？

RQ3：What are some of the contributions and limitations of and what improvements have been made across related disciplines on the fixed-traits view of culture in intercultural communication research？

RQ4：How can intercultural communication as a field possibly benefit from a dynamic process view of culture that has recently become influential in the field of cultural psychology？

RQ5：How can the dynamic process view be incorporated into intercultural communication research and how can such research in turn inform dynamic cultural theories？

These five research questions deal with the conceptual work of the present research.To test the proposed conceptual model in response to RQ5，two priming studies and one case study were conducted.Study I seeks to test the following hypothesis：

H1：The attribution responses of the participants are contrastive to the primed culture.

Study II seeks to address two hypotheses：

H2：The sayings pool the American-primed group generates is statistically more converged than the sayings pool the Chinese-primed group generates.

H3：（a）The value content of the top sayings list derived from the American priming condition exhibits a stronger collectivist orientation than the value content of the top sayings list derived from the Chinese priming condition；（b）the value content of the top sayings list derived from the Chinese priming condition exhibits a stronger individualist orientation than the value content of the top sayings list derived from the American priming condition.

Study III seeks to answer the following research question：

RQ6：How can the proposed over-tuning effect be understood using the cultural process model of intercultural communication？