How to Deal with Culture Shock

How to Deal with Culture Shock

Culture is simply the hospitality of the intellect. Your mind is open to new ideas and larger views; when they enter, you know how to receive them, and to entertain, to be entertained, and take what they have to offer without allowing them to dominate you.

--Thomas Kettle

Fish out of Water

Living at home, we never think about culture. Culture to humans is like water to fish--the fish never stops to reflect on what it means to live in the water. It just swims and goes about its normal routine. But if you take the fish and throw it on a patch of sand, water takes on a whole new meaning. The fish flops around desperately looking for the water it never knew it had!

I was literally "stuck" on a train, all alone, on my way from Bangalore to Hyberabad--about a 17-hour train ride. All of a sudden I felt lost.

I was in a foreign country where I did not speak the language and looked nothing like the dark hair, eyes, and complexion of all the bodies that surrounded me and continued to stare at me after four hours of being on the train with them. Feelings of fear, anxiety, complete unawareness of who I was, uncertainty of getting back to the ship, and a desire to see some familiar faces filled me. However, I knew I was on a train bound for another part of this country called India. How could I get back to Madras in a hurry before I had an anxiety attack?

(From Paul Pederson, The Five Stages of Culture Shock)

The experience of culture shock is similar. When you encounter a new environment, all the habits and behaviors that allowed you to get around and survive at home suddenly no longer work. Things as simple and automatic as getting lunch, saying hello to colleagues, or setting up a meeting become difficult and strange. The rules have changed and no one has told you what the new rules are.

When doing business overseas, suddenly all the habits you've developed for doing business in the United States seem out of place or positively wrong. You sell yourself and talk up your product and the other side thinks you're bragging. You try to establish a friendly rapport and they ignore you. You try to get to the bottom line and they seem irritated and uninterested.

Whenever we are faced with unfamiliar behavior, we go through varying degrees of culture shock. Symptoms can vary from confusion, loneliness, and anxiety to feelings of inferiority, fear, depression, and psychological withdrawal. Some people express intense hostility to another culture. Others simply shut down. Geert Hofstede comments that

culture shock "returns us to the mental state of an infant."

The effects of culture shock accumulate slowly. A few seemingly harmless negative experiences can end up poisoning your attitude about another culture. It is like Chinese water torture--the first few drops you don't even notice, but as time goes on the drip, drip, drip can drive you crazy.

Hostility, anxiety, or depression can affect a person's judgment and ability to communicate during delicate negotiations. Managerial duties can become a daily encounter with the enemy. Culture shock is a leading cause of early repatriations that can be quite costly for the company. The experience can be especially difficult for spouses or children who come along on overseas assignments. Without a job to give them direction and a stable point of contact with the other culture, they can feel lost and helpless.

The Stages of Cultural Adjustment

In Cultures and Organizations, Hofstede describes the stages one goes through while adjusting to another country. The first stage involves a romance with the surface features of a culture. Everything is new, different, and exciting, and feelings for the new culture are very positive. Most tourists and many short-term business travelers experience other cultures in stage one. The second stage of adjusting to another culture is culture shock, when the lack of familiar reference points and behavioral norms leads to overload and withdrawal. Feelings for the new culture become very negative. This stage often arrives for expatriates or business travelers after the initial greetings and ceremonies are over and they find they have to survive in a new culture on their own without being treated as the honored guest any longer. Culture shock can vary dramatically from person to person or situation to situation. One person can experience severe culture shock in a situation that would barely affect another. Some people barely experience culture shock on one trip and are affected severely on the next.

The third stage is a gradual period of acculturation during which the visitor learns to operate according to the norms and values of the other culture. This period requires work; learning about another culture means getting out and interacting in a meaningful way with other people in social and work settings.

The fourth and final stage is the arrival at a stable state of mind that marks the level of adjustment to the other culture. This stable state can remain negative (the person feels more or less permanently alienated), neutral (a good healthy bicultural ability), or positive (the person "goes native").

What Can Be Done to Deal with Culture Shock?

The best defense against culture shock is knowledge of how other cultures operate. In Culture Shock: Psychological Reactions to Unfamiliar Environments, Adrian Furnham and Stephen Bochner point out that culture shock is not a psychological disorder but a lack of social skills and knowledge needed to deal with a new environment. Even if things seem alien and disorienting, knowing some of the rules gives us reference points and a degree of confidence. One of the best ways to deal with culture shock is to look at the experience as an opportunity to learn--not only about the other side's culture, but also about specific factors that will influence doing business with them. Dealing with other cultures is a skill we can acquire.

The amount of time required for acculturation and how well you have adjusted at the end of the process depend largely on attitude and effort. Younger people generally have an easier time adjusting to new cultures and situations because they haven't formed a rigid framework for looking at the world and how things should be done. Adults who are set in their ways are more likely to see things that are different as deficient or threatening.

Approaching new ways of doing things with openness and curiosity can change the whole experience of being in another culture. It helps to remind yourself periodically to maintain a positive attitude and try things with an open mind. We often respond automatically to things that are different. It is possible to build up negative feelings about other cultures without being aware of it.

I had never heard of Libya before being stationed in Tripoli. About two weeks after I arrived in the country, Muhammar al-Khadafy overthrew the king in a military coup. I was assigned to work with a group of advisers to help the Libyans with their young air force. One of the first things I noticed was a strange physical feature: Many of the men had one bad eye. After some questioning, I discovered that the men had had their eyes damaged by their mothers as a way to keep them out of military service during the period when the Italians ruled the country.

Another thing that looks getting used to was the way women onlyshowed themselves in public completely covered except for one eye. When we went to visit the house of one of the Libyans we worked with, his mother brought the food to the door of the room and handed it to him without entering. We never did see her.

Later I saw the same man looking very depressed and asked what was wrong. He told me that he was getting married. This didn't seem like a reason to be depressed, until he told me that it was an arranged marriage and that he had a girlfriend he loved very much.

--Louis Krindelbaugh

The degree of culture shock you experience does not necessarily depend on how long you've been in another country. You don't absorb other cultures through osmosis. Going out to eat in local restaurants and buying souvenirs isn't enough. You have to get out and spend time with local people and learn about their perspective.

There are immigrants who have lived in the United States for 40 years and still experience culture shock. They've brought their own culture with them; they shop in their own grocery stores and hang out with their own people. The same thing can happen to Americans overseas. You can be in a foreign country for years, but if you spend all your time with other Americans and don't interact with the native culture, you might never get over culture shock.

I interviewed a woman who had accompanied her husband on an overseas assignment to Poland. She was struck by the way American lived in expatriate ghettos where they stuck with each other and had nothing to do with the local culture.

Associating only with your own compatriots is a sure sign of culture shock. It indicates that you are seeking the comfort of the known and the familiar rather than confronting and learning about differences. Really to adjust to a new culture you need to create a new framework for understanding the world. It might not be your framework, but unless you can learn to use it, you'll always be on the outside.

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