Cultural Incidents

Intercultural encounters are at the heart of the overseas experience; you can’t very well live and work abroad without coming into contact with the local people. When these encounters go wrong, and turn into cultural incidents, they become a serious threat to expatriate effectiveness. Unless this threat is met and eliminated, an expat cannot expect to have a successful overseas assignment.  The following deals with why these cultural incidents are so dangerous and how to prevent them.

Cultural incidents may cause you to turn against the local culture.

• You begin to make negative judgments about the local people.
• Subsequent interactions may reinforce these attitudes.
• You tend to see only those things which reinforce negative attitudes.
• You begin to look for ways to work around the local people.
• You may try to get locals to change some of their ways.
• Negative attitudes may cause one to limit contact with locals or avoidance of them altogether.
• Avoidance of the locals tends to increase negativity towards them.

Cultural incidents may cause you to avoid the local culture. By avoid the local culture:

• You spend your time alone or with others from your own country
• You withdraw from the local culture and live abroad without leaving home
• You submerge yourself in an expatriate subculture. While expat subcultures are a mixed blessing they may create environments that are difficult from which to break free. Life in the expat community may be a sterile, unsatisfying proposition. There are missed opportunities. One may discover they could have shared as many values and interests with the locals as with the expats they forced themselves to spend time with.
• Retreat into an expat community may not be a decision to avoid the local people, but rather the failure to pay enough attention to how time is spent.

• Some people just never adjust to a cross-cultural experience.
• To be truly effective in the overseas assignment, you must break through the desire to withdraw from the local culture.

Causes of Cultural Incidences

• We believe that other people are like us, and so they should behave like us.
• We learn right and wrong behaviors from our own cultural conditioning and think of them as normal.
• We depend on other people to be like us because of our cultural conditioning.
• We think what we do is right and that everyone should behave that way because of our cultural conditioning.
• We may be sensitive to globalization and cross-cultural training, but we do not behave that way. Logic does not override instinct.

Solutions to Problems Caused by Cultural Incidents

• Realize that our expectations of other’s behaviors rather the actual behavior of the local people is the problem.
• Stop assuming other people are like us.
• Become aware of your emotional reactions to cultural incidents.
• Recall moments when you were upset or agitated by something a local did, and look at yourself. Stop reacting emotionally.
• Learn about the local culture by observing the locals in action, asking them about specific behaviors, and through reading about or taking classes in the local culture.
• Realize that you may not see or understand something that does not constitute meaningful behavior in your own culture.
• Realize that you may misinterpret what you see because the same behavior may not mean the same thing in different cultures.
• Observe the local people.
• Go to the local people, and talk to them about their culture.
• Study about the local culture through reading or attending a class or intercultural training program.
• Adjust your expectations as you learn about the culture.
• Realize the process of cross-cultural adjustment is slow and gradual.
• Realize that local people may assume you understand their culture and that you are deliberately and knowingly behaving badly.
• Understand that the behavior of people in other cultures tends to fall into three broad categories: things they do you admire and adopt for yourself, things they do you don’t like but learn to live with, and things they do that you reject because they violate your fundamental values of identity and self-esteem.
• Accept the fact that cultural knowledge may not always explain the behavior of local people, and may not neutralize cultural incidents.
• When you cannot comply with what you know is culturally expected, explain why. This may show that you are cultural sensitive, despite the fact that you don’t behave in a cultural appropriate manner.
• Admit that there are certain things about the local culture that you will never be able to accept.
• Realize that becoming culturally effective does not men becoming a local; it means trying to see the world the way the locals do and trying to imagine how they see you.

A Model of Cross-Cultural Interaction

• We expect other people to behave like we do, but they don’t.
• Thus a cultural incident occurs…we react (with anger, worry, etc.).
• We become aware of these reactions… rather than the natural tendancy to try to avoid the local culture or a local to avoid contact with us.
• We realize it is our own behavior (expecting cultural sameness) that causes cultural incidents.
• We are thus motivated to learn about the local culture.
• We begin to expect the local people to behave like themselves.
• And there are fewer cultural incidents.

Another Model of Cross-Cultural Interaction

• The local people expect us to behave like they do.
• We behave the way the local people expect.
• And there are fewer cultural incidents.

(taken from The Art of Crossing Cultures by Craig Storti, pp. 47-95.)