2.3: Barriers to Intercultural Communication

The video below, “How to Practice Understanding,” is part of the “How You See Me” video series on YouTube and features people discussing their cultural identities. (“How You See Me”)

Most of us can appreciate the importance of intercultural communication, yet several stumbling blocks may hinder a positive intercultural communication experience. Here are some of the most common blocks.

Anxiety

It is not unusual to experience some level of discomfort in communicating with individuals from other cultures or co-cultures.  It may be that we feel as though we will do or say the wrong thing. This can make the interaction awkward or can lead us to avoid opportunities for intercultural communication. Although not as detrimental as ethnocentrism or stereotypes, anxiety can prevent us from making intercultural connections that will enrich our lives.

Assumptions of Similarities

Although you know differently, many people mistakenly assume that simply being human makes everyone alike. However, as we’ve discussed, values, beliefs, and attitudes can vary vastly from culture to culture. Those who assume a person from another cultural background is just like them will often misread or misinterpret and perhaps even be offended by any intercultural encounter. In intercultural communication, assume differences in communication style will exist that you may be unaware of. It is important to avoid interpreting another individual’s behavior through your own cultural lens.

Ethnocentrism

Where did you start reading on this page? The top left corner. Why not the bottom right corner, or the top right one? In English, we read left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom. But not everyone reads the same. If you read and write Arabic or Hebrew, you will proceed from right to left. Neither is right or wrong; simply different. Americans tend to say that people from England drive on the “wrong” side of the road rather than on the “other” side. You may find it hard to drive on the other side of the road while visiting England, but for people in the United Kingdom, it is normal and natural.  A high level of appreciation for one’s own culture can be healthy; a shared sense of community pride, for example, connects people in a society. But ethnocentrism can lead to disdain or dislike for other cultures and could cause misunderstanding and conflict. Ethnocentrism assumes our culture or co-culture is superior to or more important than others and evaluates all other cultures against it. To dismantle ethnocentrism, we must recognize that our views of the world, what we consider right and wrong, normal or weird, are largely influenced by our cultural standpoint and that our cultural standpoint is not everyone’s cultural standpoint. This ethnocentric bias has received some challenge recently in United States schools as teachers make efforts to create a multicultural classroom by incorporating books, short stories, and traditions from non-dominant groups.

Ethnocentrism shows up in large and small ways. A “small” way might be in disdain for other cultures or co-cultures food preferences. Some individuals express disgust at other cultures’ eating meat from a dog or guinea pig, for example, while they don’t question their own habit of eating cows or pigs. A “large” and one of the most horrific examples of ethnocentrism in history can be seen in the Nazi’s elevation of the Aryan race in World War II and the corresponding killing of Jews, Gypsies, gays and lesbians, and other non-Aryan groups.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people. Stereotypes can be based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation — almost any characteristic. They may be positive, such as all Asian students are good at math, but are most often negative, such as all overweight people are lazy. Stereotyping is a generalization that doesn’t take individual differences into account.

Stereotypes are frequently expressed on TV, in movies, chat rooms and blogs, and in conversations with friends and family. Further research has found that stereotypes are often used outside of our awareness, making it very difficult to correct them. And when we are distracted or under time pressure, these tendencies become even more powerful (Stangor & Duan, 1991). Still, it’s crucial to try to recognize our own stereotypic thinking. Treating individuals according to rigid stereotypic beliefs is detrimental to all aspects of the communication process and can lead to prejudice and discrimination.

Prejudice

Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one’s membership in a particular social group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more (Allport, 1954; Brown, 2010). An example of prejudice is having a negative attitude toward people who are not born in the United States and disliking them because of their status as “foreigners.”

Because it is often difficult to recognize our own prejudices, several tests have been created to help us recognize our own “implicit” or hidden biases. The most well-known implicit measure of prejudice—the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—is frequently used to assess stereotypes and prejudice (Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007). In the IAT, participants are asked to classify stimuli that they view on a computer screen into one of two categories by pressing one of two computer keys, one with their left hand and one with their right hand. Furthermore, the categories are arranged such that the responses to be answered with the left and right buttons either “fit with” (match) the stereotype or do not “fit with” (mismatch) the stereotype.  You can take the race IAT yourself.

When our prejudices and stereotypes are unchallenged, they can lead to action in the forms of discrimination and even violence.

Racial discrimination is discrimination against an individual based solely on membership in a specific racial group. There have been a number of shocking, highly publicized instances in which African-Americans were killed by vigilantes or law enforcement, one of the more disturbing being the case of George Floyd.  On May 25, 2020, George Floyd died after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for over eight minutes; almost three of those minutes were after Floyd was unconscious (Dovidio et al., 2010).  And in late 2020, the United Nations issued a report that detailed “an alarming level of racially motivated violence and other hate incidents against Asian Americans.” According to a Pew Research Report, “32% of Asian adults say they have feared someone might threaten or physically attack them…with the majority of Asian adults (81%) saying violence against them is increasing (Ruiz, Edwards & Lopez, 2021).  Mexican Americans and other Latinx groups are also targets, both of citizens and police (Dovidio et al., 2010).

Discussions about stereotypes, prejudice, racism, and discrimination are unsettling to some. However, we must recognize these attributes in ourselves and others before we can take steps to challenge and change their existence.

References

Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.

Brown, R. (2010). Prejudice: Its social psychology, (2nd edition). Wiley-Blackwell.

Dovidio, J. F., Hewstone, M., Glick, P., & Esses, V. M. (2010). Prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination: Theoretical and empirical overview. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Nosek, B. A., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2007). The Implicit Association Test at Age 7: A Methodological and Conceptual Review. In J. A. Bargh (Ed.), Social psychology and the unconscious: The automaticity of higher mental processes (pp. 265–292). Psychology Press.

Ruiz, N. G., Edwards, K., & Lopez, M. H. (2021, April 21). One-third of Asian Americans fear threats, physical attacks and most say violence against them is rising. Pew Research Center.

Stangor , C., & Duan, C. (1991). Effects of multiple task demands upon memory for information about social groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27(4), 357-378.