Everyday life exists of meeting familiar and unfamiliar faces. Unfamiliar faces, habits, beliefs and cultures are what constitutes ‘The Other’. Travelling and working abroad makes us much more aware of ‘The Other’. In the ‘Understanding the Other’ series of blogposts you learn more about the deeper, underlying layers of other cultures. In the process you become more aware of your own culture and life choices, opening the door for personal development and improving your social interactions with other cultures and lifestyle, either at home or abroad. This is part 7: The process of cultural adaptation. Image by Mohamed Hassan.
Cultural adaptation
Schema theory explains how people form and adjust knowledge structures in their brain and is useful for explaining the learning process that they go through when they travel abroad and need to adjust to an unfamiliar foreign environment (Coelho 1962; Nishida 1999).
Schema theory
Schemas can be defined as generalized collections of knowledge of past experiences. This knowledge includes associations between social roles, identity, facts, etiquette, procedures, problem solving strategies and emotional states.
Psychologists hypothesize that a change in one schema causes changes in all the others, and in the total system. There is a distinction between meaning schemas and meaning perspectives. Meaning schemes are sets of related and habitual expectations governing ‘if-then’, ‘cause-effect’ and category relationships, as well as event sequences. Meaning perspectives are made up of higher-order schemas, theories, propositions, beliefs, goal orientations, and what linguists call “networks of arguments‟. Meaning perspectives are defined as “broad sets of predispositions resulting from psychocultural assumptions which determine the horizons of our expectations” (Mezirow 1991).
Schema formation in daily life
Schemas are gradually formed by conscious and unconscious lessons learnt from daily events and experiences. When a person encounters a familiar situation, the already built cognitive structures are retrieved, helping the person to categorize information, interpret stimuli and then select appropriate reactions. As similar experiences accumulate, the schemas become more organized, stable and elaborate. Hence, the more experience individuals gain in any cultural context, the less energy and effort they need to spend to comprehend and react to situations (Nishida 1999; Piaget 1929).
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are a product of knowledge schemes. They represent mental ‘files’ or images that people use to help them process new information by comparing it with past experience. Although stereotypes may be useful for rapid decision making, they can be counter-productive when rigidly applied in unfamiliar situations (Schneider & Barsoux 2003). Developmental psychologists suggest that a child’s fundamental value schemes are anchored by around the age of ten, due to ‘mental programming’ which starts in the family and develops further through schools, associations, work, public life and community (Hofstede 2003: 20).
Schema conflict
Schema development occurs when there is a cognitive conflict between existing schemas and new information. An overseas experience is likely to provide a strong stimulus for this occurring as cross-cultural adaptation involves the transformation of one’s own schemas toward those of the host culture and acquiring new schemas within the host culture environment (Chang 2009; Nishida 1999).
A cross-cultural encounter leads individuals to assimilate and accommodate new stimuli, thus adjusting their schemas. Assimilation describes the process of making the experienced world fit into the existing schemas. Accommodation, on the other hand, occurs when the new experience does not fit into the existing schemas, leading people to modify them. Assimilation and accommodation are strategies which are often applied simultaneously as found by Ying (2002) in her longitudinal study on the personality change of Taiwanese students in the United States.
In addition to these two strategies, there is also a third option, people withdraw from the situation and stop learning. In other words, instead of changing the schemas that have proven inadequate in a new context, they choose to change their situation and environment (Chang 2009).
Anxiety
In intercultural interactions, anxiety (the fear of not being able to accurately predict or control a ‘foreign’ situation) has an important impact on the schema adaption strategy (Gudykunst & Hammer 1988 cited in: Beamer 1995). This anxiety could translate into a denial of the differences between oneself and ‘the Other’ or a dominant pose, both reflecting an assimilation strategy. Another coping response is to reject the new situation and withdraw from it.
The individuals choice of a particular schema adaptation strategy might depend on (1) the personality and coping strategy of the individual (2) the intensity of the experience, e.g. the distance between the two cultures, and/or (3) the interpretation and guidance provided by influential others (Adler 1975). Osland’s research into learning amongst expatriates (2000) found that major transformations in thinking can be characterized by a letting go of unquestioned acceptance of basic (cultural) assumptions and a taking on of new, broader, schema.
Go to part 8: The importance of reflection
Related books (which include all references)
