Cultural Barriers

When communicating across cultures, we could confront some cultural barriers. One of these is culture shock, or the process of challenges to adjusting to life in a new culture, and another is verbal communication. This lesson discusses these two elements.

Culture shock

When people uproot themselves and place themselves in a completely different culture, they often experience culture shock. This can occur when you are moving to a new country, or also when you are making the transition from small town high school life to on campus university life.

Culture shock is an emotional experience as intense emotions are combined with behavioral confusion and an inability to think clearly. This can occur to both shorter term travelers, such as exchange students, business people, or Peace Corps volunteers, as well as long term immigrants along various stages of the process toward adapting to the new culture. Essentially, culture shock is the stress experienced from moving to a familiar environment to a completely unfamiliar one. This unfamiliar environment seems to strip an individual's identity of all protection, as previously familiar cues and scripts are suddenly irrelevant and inoperable in this new culture, which relies and functions on an entirely new, and yet unknown, set of cues and scripts.

In the new culture, everything is different, including proper greetings and departing communication behaviors. Some research presents culture shock as the ABCs of culture shock in terms of affective, behavioral, and cognitive disorientation dimensions. At the initial stage of culture shock, people often experience anxiety, bewilderment, confusion, disorientation, and perplexity, along with a desire to be somewhere else. This is the affective component of the ABCs.

In terms of behavior, they are confused about the norms and rules that guide communication appropriateness and effectiveness. They often do not understand how to initiate and maintain smooth conversations with the local people, and how to conduct themselves appropriately in terms of nonverbal cues.

In terms of cognition, these individuals lack cultural interpretive competence and are unable to explain "bizarre" behaviors occurring around them.

Culture shock is driven by the anxiety that results from not knowing what to do, or how to behave socially, or how to interpret what we see. We do not know when to shake hands or what to say when we meet someone new or when and how to leave a proper tip. In our home cultures, all of these cadences are taken for granted, yet in the new culture, they are completely unknown. We begin to recognize the importance of intercultural learning and intercultural competence skills when we begin to feel very inept in the new culture and our peace of mind is suddenly jolted.

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