Culture Shock
– Causes & Symptoms
Contemporary research
in the areas of neural, perceptual, cognitive and evolutionary psychology
support the idea that we operate within and upon our physical and social
environments by way of evolved and hardwired neural-circuits which guide our
species-typical behavior at a macro level.
In addition to these are the more plastic neural networks and resulting
neuro-perceptual-cognitive maps that allow us flexibility and adaptive
variability. Large numbers or
bundles of these species-typical content-specific neural-circuits are what allow
for the great problem solving abilities of the human mind and the
species-variability of behavior in response to environmental differences. These patterns of responses we call
culture. Species-variable cognitive
maps are both physical networks of neurons in our brains as well as
informational networks of content accumulated and defined by sociocultural
experiences and stored as memory.
These cognitive maps operate at both the individual and collective
levels, and people who share a culture also share aspects of the collective
cognitive map.
Both the physical
neural networks and the informational content of these culturally influenced
networks are somewhat flexible due to our neural plasticity and can and do
change and adapt through experience and learning and through both conscious and
unconscious effort. But our
tendency is to rely on these networks or mental maps in a relatively consistent
and stable manner, unless forced to change in order to adapt. These networks provide proven and
somewhat predetermined maps for us to use in the processing of information from
our sociocultural and physical environments. They are more than just memory and they
allow our brains to negotiate our environments without having to reinvent
responses all the time. Once these
neural networks and cognitive maps are laid down and used for many years they
become somewhat difficult to change and require considerable effort to do
so. A mismatch between our
neuro-perceptual-cognitive maps and our physical and sociocultural environments
can therefore cause considerable uncertainty, confusion, insecurity and
anxiety. The complex of thought,
emotion and behavior caused by this mismatch is called culture shock.
Culture shock is the
term used to denote the anxiety and stress reactions that some people experience
when they live in a cultural and linguistic environment that is significantly
different from their own. The
anxiety, stress and resulting thoughts, emotions and behaviors are caused by
cognitive dissonance and uncertainty due to disconfirmed expectancies and
ego-identity diminishment.
Cognitive dissonance (uneasiness) occurs when people’s cognitions about
themselves and the world around them are inconsistent with one another. The disconfirmed expectancies that we
experience when living in a different culture contribute to this cognitive
dissonance and to uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety and stress. In addition, individuals also experience
anxiety and stress due to ego-identity diminishment. Our identities are rooted in our home
culture and its particular physical and sociocultural environment. When we leave that particular complex of
sociocultural and physical environmental factors we also leave the roots that
support and nourish our personalities.
Frustration, anxiety
and stress also occur whenever people can’t do all the things they are
accustomed to doing in their everyday lives. These can include work, home and leisure
related activities that they are either no longer able to do at all or no longer
able to do like they are accustomed to.
For example, sometimes because of differences in transportation services
people cannot move around as freely or as widely as they are accustomed to. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in
Fiji we were not allowed to own or rent cars and had to ride only buses and
taxis. When I first moved to
American Samoa, Palau and Pohnpei I was always without a car for a while until I
could find a suitable one at a good price. My family and I had to do a lot of
walking and riding in taxis. For
things like grocery shopping, getting to work and getting the kids to school on
time, not having a car can be quite an inconvenience, particularly for Americans
so accustomed to ease of movement via a personal automobile. Taxi drivers can also be
undependable. You can call a
taxi company and they will tell you that a car is on the way but it may arrive
much too late for your needs, or after it picks you up it may drive around
picking up other customers for a while, and sometimes it never arrives at
all. In Fiji there are a lot
of taxis and buses and transportation is pretty good and fares low. In Samoa it's good to negotiate the fare
with taxis right up front or risk an occasional unreasonable fare. In Palau all taxis have standard fares
posted for customers to see thereby removing potential confusion and
conflict. In Pohnpei the number of
cars rapidly increased in the late 1990’s and today there are many taxis with
reasonable fares and the prices of automobiles have also gone down
considerably.
In addition to
transportation constraints, if a person from a large continental urban society
moves to a small island society they may experience a sense of social and
spatial claustrophobia, more so than someone who is from a rural or small town
society. Pacific islands come in
many different sizes, from large islands like the main islands of New Caledonia,
Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii, to very small atolls in Micronesia that you could almost
throw a stone across. To a person
from a large continental urban society, even the larger Pacific islands can seem
quite small. On the open highways
of the United States a person can drive for hours and days on end across the
spacious plains, deserts and mountains.
On Pacific islands there is no such driving experiences to be found. On the other hand, the Pacific does
offer weeks and months of sailing across its vast expanses in ships and boats as
well as ocean exploration through diving.
Another source of
considerable distress for some people is not being able to eat the foods they
are accustomed to. Anyone who wants
to live and work overseas should be prepared to make considerable changes in
their diet and get accustomed to the local foods and the sometimes limited
selection of familiar foods in the stores and restaurants. They may not have the nice variety
of very large and well-stocked grocery stores they had back home or the many
choices of restaurants and fast-food places. Fiji and Samoa have an abundant
variety of foods which can be found in public markets, restaurants, shops and
fast-food stores while Pohnpei and other parts of Micronesia are more limited in
the types of food you will find on a regular basis. Palau has a good variety of foods
and restaurants due to its tourism industry. American Samoa is somewhere in
between Fiji and Pohnpei with regard to variety of foods. Fiji has had a McDonalds for several
years and one recently opened in American Samoa, while Palau can boast of a
Winchell’s Donuts.
When living overseas in a
place where the people speak a different language it can be difficult to make
yourself understood even in relatively simple but important areas of life such
as shopping and getting around town.
It can be frustrating trying to ask for something in a store, to pay and
receive change, and to try to tell the taxi driver where you are going. Sometimes you are certain that people
understand you but are just pretending that they don’t, and other times they
make a very considerable effort to communicate with you regardless of their
authentic English language limitations. In
most parts of the Pacific, however, people speak pretty good English and basic
communication is not a big problem. Fiji, the Solomon Islands and
Samoa speak British-Australian-New Zealand-style English, while American-style
English is spoken in American Samoa and Micronesia. French is spoken in
New Caledonia, French Polynesia and part of Vanuatu.
And lastly is the issue of values. A person can experience considerable stress and anxiety when they are living in a different culture with different values from their own. A person may find that some of their own cherished and deeply held values and assumptions about life may not be equally important to members of their new host culture. The areas of religion, moral behavior, justice and fair play, racial equality, work ethic and privacy are areas where there may a great deal of cultural relativism, and people living and working overseas need to learn to deal with these differences in a relaxed and nonjudgmental way. Throughout the Pacific, you will generally find that islanders have stronger family values than is the norm back in U.S. urban settings.
One area of
Pacific island culture that some people have a particularly hard time adjusting
to is privacy – in Pacific island societies there is sometimes none, or at least
very little of it.
These are oral cultures where people pass the time of day or night
telling stories about the people, places, things and ideas encountered during
their day. Gossiping is a
favorite pastime for Pacific islanders and everybody knows a lot about many
other peoples’ sayings and doings.
Gossip plays a large social control function and manages to keep people
at least publicly in line. To do
something completely out of the public eye is possible but requires considerable
cleverness. Gossip is important in
all societies, in fact it is a robust human universal and is considered by some
paleolinguists and anthropologists to be one of the major reasons why humans
began to speak in the first place.
Gossip transmits important information about peoples’ behavior and moral
character and hence its prominent social control function. Gossip also binds people together
socially because you must normally be at least partly accepted into a person’s
in-group before they will share valuable tidbits of gossip with you.
And the
list of potential causes of culture shock could go on. A productive exercise for someone living
and working abroad is to regularly explore cross-cultural stress points between
their own culture and that of their hosts in order to bring these areas of
cultural conflict more into the open where they can be acknowledged and more
objectively analyzed and dealt with.
The specific symptoms
that emerge from the stress and anxiety of culture shock include depression and
withdrawal, negative stereotyping of the local people, excessive criticism of
them, excessive socioemotional dependence upon fellow foreign nationals and
expatriates like themselves, and the inability to form socioemotional
relationships with members of the host culture. Other symptoms include escapist behavior
such as excessive sleeping, a solitary immersion in reading books or other
solitary activities, an all-consuming desire for news from home, daydreaming
about foods from home and alcohol and drug abuse.
Culture shock can be
prevented by striving to become more culturally relativistic and flexible in
your thinking and behavior, by developing a real enthusiasm for learning about
the host culture and by forming real intercultural relationships. Successful cross-cultural communications
is a fairly straightforward proposition.
With the correct attitude, a few good cultural informants, a few
cross-cultural communications concepts and some time spent as a
participant-observer, a person will quite naturally develop a repertoire of
intercultural interaction skills.
And, when a person begins to move further along the continuum of
cross-cultural understanding and interaction, they will more quickly put down
ego-identity roots in the new host culture and feel more at ease with themselves
and their surroundings. They will
become more happy and productive at work, at home or while moving about within
the society at large. They will no
longer be negatively affected by disconfirmed expectancies. They will understand more and be
understood more by others. In
short, they will have become bicultural individuals.