Chapter 5: What is Culture Shock?

Culture Shock

Culture Shock - Stress and Feeling of disorientation we experience in a new culture - Kalervo Oberg (1960)

Understanding culture shock helps us manage our own and show sensitivity to others facing it

Cross Cultural Boundaries - for work, study, life, business, perform, Volunteer, government service

We bring our cultural habits, scripts, and interaction routines, which can lead to clashes in new cultural environments

Culture Shock Characteristics

Intensely emotional experience

Cues/scripts previously familiar now inoperable

Unfamiliarity creates perceived threat triggering fear and emotional vulnerability

Positives And Negatives of Culture Shock

Positives

• Enhances tolerance for ambiguity

• Behavioral competence in social interactions

• Optimism about self, others and everyday surrounding

• Cognitive openness and flexibility

Negative

• Psychosomatic - stress problems

  • Stomach aches

  • Head Aches

• Cognitive Exhaustion - Difficulty in making accurate attributions

• Affective Upheavals - loneliness, isolation, depression, mood swings, interaction awkwardness

Underlying Factors

Motivational - Voluntary vs Involuntary: Temporary vs Permanent

Personal Expectations - Realistic vs Unrealistic

Communication Competence - Cross-cultural empathy, behavioral flexibility

Psychological Adjustment - Self-esteem, coping mastery

Socio-cultural Adjustment - “Fit in“ and form relationships

Cultural Distance - Language, verbal and nonverbal styles, values, social systems

• Closer distances falsely presume “Cultural Similarity“

Personality Attributes - Tolerance for ambiguity, introvert/extravert, internal/external LOC, “alignment“ (collectivist/individualist)

Who Experiences Culture Shock?

Tourists

• Voluntary

• Temporary visitor

• Usually for recreational purpose

Sojourners

• Voluntary

• Temporary Resident

• Usually for task-based purpose

  • business or academic

U-Curve Adjustment Model - Lysgaard, 1955

Initial Adjustment - Honeymoon elation and optimism

Crisis - Overwhelmed by own incompetence, stress

Regained Adjustment - settling in and coping effectively

W-Shape Adjustment Model - Gullahorn and Gullahorn, 1963

Honeymoon - Curiosity, excitement, homesickness

Hostility - Emotional upheavals, loss of confidence, frustrated, “consciously incompetent,” emotionally drained, & aggressive or withdrawn

Humorous - laugh at mistakes, objectively compare cultures; build social networks

In-sync - feel at home, comfortable w/local customs, language & behaviors, & act as model for incoming sojourners

Ambivalence - mixed emotions about returning home, but excited
to return to familiarity & share experiences

Re-entry Culture shock - stressed adjusting to aligning new identity w/ once-familiar enviro; greater cultural dist., more intense re-entry shock

Re-socialization

• re-socializers - assimilate & suppress
  new skills & attitudes to avoid
  dissonance

• alienators – struggle to reintegrate, seek
  new opportunities abroad

• transformers – become change agents,
  integrating new experiences into
  home culture