In interactions between people with different behavioural repertoires, communication errors are more frequent than between people who speak the same language and follow similar customs and habits. Nowadays, we tend to refer to such differences in behaviour as differences in “culture”. In intercultural communication research and training, this comes often with the presumption that those who grow up in another society as ours somehow are unlike “us” psychologically. In this chapter, the point of departure is that everyday interpretations of behavioural differences are influenced demonstrably by our own ethnocentrism and systematic biases. An approach to intercultural training (IT) is outlined with low emphasis on extensive psychological differences and high emphasis on the actual context in which people live and on specific rules that only hold in specific categories of situations. Implications of this approach are illustrated with reference to an existing module on intercultural training.

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An Intercultural Training Module That Is More About “Us” Than About “Them” and the Underlying Rationale

  • Ype H. Poortinga,
  • Michael Bender

摘要

In interactions between people with different behavioural repertoires, communication errors are more frequent than between people who speak the same language and follow similar customs and habits. Nowadays, we tend to refer to such differences in behaviour as differences in “culture”. In intercultural communication research and training, this comes often with the presumption that those who grow up in another society as ours somehow are unlike “us” psychologically. In this chapter, the point of departure is that everyday interpretations of behavioural differences are influenced demonstrably by our own ethnocentrism and systematic biases. An approach to intercultural training (IT) is outlined with low emphasis on extensive psychological differences and high emphasis on the actual context in which people live and on specific rules that only hold in specific categories of situations. Implications of this approach are illustrated with reference to an existing module on intercultural training.