Overcome Intergroup Biases
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Learning about other cultures is a great start to improving intercultural communication. But many scholars also recommend spending time with members of other cultures and co-cultures, both virtually and face to face.
Intergroup contact theory is one prominent idea for addressing intercultural challenges (Allport, 1954). According to this theory, interaction between members of different social groups generates a possibility for more positive attitudes to emerge (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). In other words, if you have contact with people who are different from you, you realize that the expectations you had about them might be incorrect, and this helps you better understand others. By getting to know others across the ocean or across the street, you will have reduced uncertainty about what is likely to happen in encounters with them. You will become more confident, more knowledgeable about how to behave, more decisive, more able to predict behavior, and thus more likely to understand one another (Gudykunst, 2004).
Many mainstream films in the United States are based on foreign-language films from other cultures, such as The Departed (2006, based on Infernal Affairs, 2002, from Hong Kong), The Tourist (2010, based on the French film Anthony Zimmer, 2005), and Let Me In (2010, based on Sweden’s Let the Right One In, 2008). Watch one such film, as well as the original foreign-language movie that inspired it. What cultural changes to the story can you detect? How do the nonverbal behaviors of the actors differ?
Although contact theory has some support, researchers also find that mindlessly getting people from different groups together can actually backfire and reinforce cultural stereotypes (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). This happened in many U.S. cities during the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a highly controversial effort to racially integrate schools by busing children to schools in other neighborhoods, which were sometimes on faraway sides of their cities. Even staunch proponents of the plan admitted that racial tensions became worse, not better (Frum, 2000).
So, how do we make successful intergroup interactions more likely? First, intergroup researchers argue that we must have good quality contact with outgroup members because negative contact can increase the perception of differences (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). But good contact is not enough because it is easy to explain away such positive interactions as unique to the individual or the situation. For example, if you believe that fraternity brothers are simply party boys and you wind up in a study group with a particularly hardworking member of Phi Sigma Phi, you can mentally create excuses: “Ben is the exception to the rule.” Researchers argue that we must have good contact with people we think are “typical” of their group (Giles, Reid, & Harwood, 2010). If you attended a few fraternity events and got to see Ben and several of his brothers more regularly in their fraternity setting, you might learn that many of them are serious students and that a few of them aren’t even into the party scene. We all need to be aware of our own behaviors and biased perceptions when interacting with members of other cultures and groups so that we do not simply confirm our existing expectations.