Theoretical Principles of

Cultural Contact
Brief summary of key terms and
processes referred to as accounting
for barriers to successful
intercultural relations.
Catherine Baker, Modern College of
Business & Science, Muscat, Oman
From: Ward, Furnham & Bochner (2001) The Psychology of
Culture Shock.
 similarity-attraction hypothesis
This predicts that individuals are more likely to seek out, enjoy,
understand, want to work and play with, trust, believe, vote for,
and generally prefer people with whom they share important
characteristics. These include interests, values, religion, group
affiliation, skills, physical attributes, age, language, and all the
other aspects on which human beings differ. At the same time,
since cultural identification by definition characterizes people
according to the idiosyncratic characteristics which distinguish
them from other groups, it follows that cross-cultural interactions
often occur between individuals who are likely to be dissimilar on
at least some of these dimensions.
 closeness or distance with respect
to sociocultural features

This can be illustrated by giving the example of Australia and

New Zealand, which would be expected to be culturally closer to
each other than Australia and Japan, in terms of elements such
as language, religion, the status of women, individualism-
collectivism*, attitudes to authority, forms of government, legal
systems, and attitudes to the environment. The culture distance
gap predicts that the greater the cultural gap between
participants, the more difficulties they will experience.
 social categorization

The tendency for individuals to classify others as members of a

group, in particular whether they belong to their own, in-group,
or to some other, out-group. This has consequences for how
people who are categorized in this way are perceived and
treated, with the in-group usually, but not always, being given
preference. The process of stereotyping also contributes to the
dynamics of intercultural contact. This is where we attribute to
individuals the traits that allegedly characterize the group that
the target person has been assigned to by the perceiver.
 primary socialization
This is the process through which persons acquire a set of core values
early in their lives. They then come to regard these as reflecting
reality and, therefore, as absolutely true and, for a variety of reasons,
they are highly resistant to change. This may result in belief systems
that are not universally shared and values that are diametrically
opposed. When members of two such groups come into contact, the
potential for conflict is obvious. A contemporary example is the
contrast between the status of women in fundamental Muslim
societies, on the other hand, and in secular Western societies such as
Sweden, on the other. It is unlikely that there would be much
agreement on this important social issue if it were to come up in a
meeting between members of these two societies.
 cultural syndromes
These are patterns of attitudes, beliefs, norms and behaviours that can be
used to contrast groups of cultures. Three major cultural syndromes are
cultural complexity, tight versus loose cultures, and individualism-
collectivism*. There are many aspects on which cultures are identified as
belonging to any one of these categories, or descriptions. For example,
people from tight cultures prefer certainty and security. Because they value
predictability, they are likely to reject people from loose cultures,
perceiving them as unreliable and undisciplined. People from complex
cultures pay attention to time, where time is seen as money to be spent, to
be saved or, in unfortunate circumstances, to be wasted. When meetings
between persons from more or less complex cultures occur, the latter may
be perceived as rude, lazy, or disrespectful because of operating on ‘elastic
time’.