Essay On Cultural Conflict

751 Words4 Pages

People are living in the era of globalization. Every year, there is an increase in the number of immigrants and emigrants to foreign countries with the purpose of living and studying. As a result, cross-culture communication takes place in many nations. Obviously, no one can learn everything about all cultures and not any culture is completely similar. This inevitably entails culture conflict. According to Wikipedia, cultural conflicts are disagreements between cultural beliefs and values by two or more sides. Cultural conflict occurs when people's expectations of a certain behavior coming from their cultural backgrounds are not met, as others have different cultural backgrounds and different expectations. Culture conflict is a theory based …show more content…

We are ethnocentric when we use our cultural norms to make generalizations about other people’s cultures and customs. Such generalizations ─ often made without a conscious awareness that we've used in our culture as a universal yardstick ─ can be very inaccurate and cause us to misjudge other peoples. For example: When foreign visitors from areas where coffee is served very black and strong taste American coffee, they do not say that it is different; they say that American coffee is bad. Likewise, when Americans go abroad to countries where coffee is black and strong, they taste the coffee and do not say that it is different; they, too, say that it is bad. Conflict is a normal part of human interaction. Due to the differences in high-context and low-context cultures as well as the variation in verbal and non-verbal communication, there does not seem to be any gesture and manner of communication that have the same meaning in all societies. Furthermore, not many people have a profound knowledge in the communication styles of their partners. Misinterpretation appears and entails cultural conflict as a result. For example: People in high-context cultures often find low-context speakers loud and insensitive, while people in low-context cultures have trouble understanding why high-context speakers don’t say what they