1. Chapter 12 The Potential for Intercultural Competence
Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures Myron W. Lustig & Jolene Koester
Chapter 12
The Potential for Intercultural Competence
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2. Intercultural Contact
Many people believe that creating the opportunity for personal contact fosters positive attitudes toward members of other groups.
Unfortunately there is much evidence to show that this belief is untrue.
Under many circumstances, such contact only reinforces negative attitudes or may even change a neutral attitude into a negative one.
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3. Intercultural Contact
Power differences between groups
Not all groups within a nation or region have equal access to sources of institutional and economic power.
The cultural group that has primary access to institutional and economic power is often characterized as the dominant culture.
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4. Intercultural Contact
Influences of dominant and subordinate group membership on interpersonal and intercultural processes are as follows:
Members of dominant cultures will often devalue the language styles of subordinate cultural members and judge the “correctness” of their use of preferred speech patterns.
Members of the dominant group also have much greater access to public and mass communication channels.
Muted group theory suggests, individuals who do not belong to the dominant group are often silenced by a lack of opportunities to express their experiences, perceptions, and worldviews.
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5. Attitudes among cultural members
There are 4 conditions that are likely to lead to positive attitudes as a result of intercultural communication.
There must be support from the top; those in charge must support the intercultural contact.
Those involved must have a personal stake in the outcome; individuals should have something to gain or lose that makes them regard the intercultural interaction as personal.
The actual intercultural contacts are viewed as pleasing and constructive; cooperative and enjoyable interactions make people feel good about their experiences and increases the prospects for further intercultural contacts.
Those involved should share common goals or view the interaction as allowing them to achieve their individual goals.
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6. Attitudes among cultural members
The strength of identification that members of a culture have for their cultural group can affect attitudes and outcomes.
Recent studies suggest that the degree of perceived threat influences attitudes and outcomes.
If members of a culture believe that certain fundamental aspects of their cultural identity are threatened, they are likely to increase their identification with their ingroup and intercultural contacts are less likely to be favorable.
Even people from majority groups sometimes see the presence of people from other cultures as threatening.
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7. Outcomes of intercultural contact
In general, intercultural communication creates stress for most individuals.
Adaptation is the process by which people establish and maintain relatively stable, helpful, and mutually shared relationships with others upon relocating to an unfamiliar cultural setting.
b. Adaptation includes physical (food, climate, housing), biological (viruses and bacteria), and social (ingroup-outgroup) changes.
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8. Culture shock versus adaptation
Sustained intercultural contact can lead to culture shock.
Culture shock occurs when people must deal with a barrage of new perceptual stimuli that are difficult to interpret because the cultural context has changed.
Things taken for granted at home require virtually constant monitoring in the new culture to assure some degree of understanding.
The loss of predictability, coupled with fatigue from constantly focusing on what normally would be taken for granted, produces the negative responses associated with culture shock.
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9. Culture shock versus adaptation
New media such as Internet-based video, blogs, and the phone can help a person describe feelings of alienation and homesickness when adjusting to life abroad which, in turn, can reduce the stresses of adaptation.
The U-curve and the W-curve hypotheses of cultural adaption suggests how people adapt to cultural changes.
However, the pattern of adaptation varies widely from one person to the next, therefore no single pattern of adaptation can be said to be typical.
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10. The adaptation process
The adaptation process has three dimensions.
The ability to deal with psychological stress.
The skill in communicating with others both effectively and appropriately.
The proficiency in establishing interpersonal relationships.
Two important concerns shape responses of individuals and groups to intercultural contact.
The concern whether it is considered important to maintain one’s cultural identity and to display its characteristics.
The concern whether people believe it is important to maintain relationships with their outgroups.
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11. The adaptation process
Assimilation means taking on a new culture’s beliefs, values, norms, and social practices.
Integration occurs when an individual or group retains its original cultural identity while seeking to maintain harmonious relationships with other cultures.
Separation occurs if a culture does not want positive relationships with another culture and wants to retain its cultural characteristics.
Segregation occurs when the more politically and economically powerful culture does not want intercultural contact with a cultural group and a forced separation occurs.
Marginalization occurs when individuals or groups neither retain their cultural heritage nor maintain positive contacts with other cultural groups.
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12. The adaptation process
Intercultural personhood is used to describe the progression by which individuals move beyond the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their initial cultural framework to incorporate other cultural realities.
Interculturally competent communicators integrate a wide array of culture-general knowledge into their behavioral repertoires.
They are able to apply that knowledge to the specific cultures in which they interact.
They respond emotionally and behaviorally with a wide range of behavioral choices in order to act appropriately and effectively within the constraints of each situation.
They have typically had extensive intercultural communication experiences.
They have learned to adjust to alternative patterns of thinking and behaving.
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13. Tourism
It is the most common way that face-to-face intercultural contacts occur.
However, motives for visiting other places may vary.
Three reasons why the tourist experience creates a special and unique form of intercultural contact.
Tourists’ intercultural contacts are predominantly short-term and voluntary.
The nature of the tourist-host relationship is distinctive and not necessarily perceived in the same way by the tourist and the host.
Tourism also exists within a social and political context.
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14. The Ethics of Intercultural Competence
Three key ethical dilemmas.
I. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Respecting differences in verbal and nonverbal codes means that a newcomer takes responsibility for learning as much about the codes as practical.
Sometimes, wholesale adoption of new cultural practices by a group of newcomers may seem disrespectful and can upset those from the host culture.
Sometimes it is difficult for people to change their behaviors to match cultural patterns that contradict their own beliefs and values.
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15. The Ethics of Intercultural Competence
Three key ethical dilemmas.
II. Are cultural values relative or
universal?
A culturally relativistic point of view suggests that every culture has its own set of values and that judgments can be made only within the context of the particular culture.
There are 2 values that transcend all cultures.
The human spirit requires that all people must struggle to improve their world and to maintain their own sense of dignity, always within the context of their own particular culture.
The second universal value is a world at peace.
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16. The Ethics of Intercultural Competence
Three key ethical dilemmas.
III. Do the ends justify the means?
Certain outcomes of intercultural contact may not necessarily be justified by the means used to obtain them.
The competent intercultural communicator must confront these ethical dilemmas that include whether it is ethical to go to another country for whatever reason.
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17. The Ethics of Intercultural Competence
Ethical communicators should try to do the following:
Address people of other cultures with the same respect that they would like to receive themselves.
Try to describe the world as they perceive it as accurately as possible.
Encourage people from other cultures to express themselves in their unique natures.
Strive for identification with people of other cultures.
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18. The Perils and Prospects for Intercultural Competence
Impact of national and international events on intercultural communication
Major events in history fundamentally alter the basic and often unquestioned understandings that people have of their social world.
These events have profound effects on many individuals, who subsequently shape the understandings of others in the generations that follow.
Forces that pull us together and apart could be described as engagement versus isolationism, globalism versus nationalism, secularism versus spiritualism, consumerism versus fundamentalism, or capitalism versus tribalism
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19. The Perils and Prospects for Intercultural Competence
An understanding of the effects of culture on the human communication process.
The patina of familiarity and commonality does not necessarily produce a shared understanding of the nature of everyday events.
We must attempt to achieve understanding while recognizing that agreement may not always be likely, or even possible.
Cultures and their symbolic systems bring change overtime; no culture is static.
The forces promoting globalization and those encouraging individuation are mediated by the cultural patterns of all peoples.
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20. Discussion Questions What experiences have you had with adaptation?
What responsibility does a visitor from another culture have to the host culture’s ways of living, thinking, and communicating?
What can we do to make the world a place where many cultures live and thrive?
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