Culture Shock Due to Contact with Unfamiliar Cultures

By S. Bochner. 2003

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The topic of this chapter is the social psychology of cross-cultural interaction. We discuss the psychological processes that take place during and after meetings between individuals and groups who differ in their cultural backgrounds. We identify two types of cross-cultural contact: a) meetings that occur between two societies when individuals travel from their place of origin to another country for a specific purpose and a limited amount of time, such people being called sojourners in the literature; and b) meetings within multi-cultural societies among its ethnically diverse permanent residents. Contact with culturally unfamiliar people and places can be unsettling, and the term "culture shock" is frequently used to describe how people react to novel or unaccustomed situations. Although the unknown can be terrifying, we nevertheless argue that "culture shock" is not inevitable, or for that matter as widespread as is often suggested. Indeed, in many circumstances culture contact can be a satisfying experience. We draw on the ABC model of culture contact to provide a framework for the discussion, that is, we distinguish between the Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive components of cross-cultural interaction. In the chapter we describe the conditions that determine whether the contact will have positive or adverse consequences, and the psychological techniques that can be deployed to increase cross-cultural understanding among the individuals, groups and societies in contact. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol8/iss1/7

Subfields: Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20725a7da7b720d6b004e2773ea0a68a282c2f2e

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In Social Psychology

1. J. Wilson
2. A. Bethel
3. Velichko H. Fetvadjiev
4. C. Ward
5. Ying Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring Cultural Competencies: The Development and Validation of a Revised Measure of Sociocultural Adaptation (2017, background): “Bochner (2003) proposed that culturally learned adaptive behaviors fall into three basic categories: interactional (communicating effectively and managing casual interactions with members of the host culture), relational (establishing host national friendships and social networks), and instrumental…”