Intercultural Misunderstandings: Causes and Outcomes

This article discusses the causes and outcomes of intercultural misunderstandings, including cross-cultural conflicts, overemphasizing or underestimating the influence of other cultures, and emotional disturbance. It provides real-life examples of such incidents, such as teasing based on skin color and assumptions about a person's culture or background. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding different cultures to avoid such conflicts.

Intercultural Misunderstandings

1. The speaker informed the listeners about her experiences of being a Nigerian in her
childhood as well as in her youth. She is telling about how people’s perceptions are
about the Africans and how they think that it is a tribal place where people do not
have such amenities as the US or any other developed countries have. There is always
a two side to any story but when people know only a single side, there comes danger.
The outcomes of this can be:
 There will always be a difference in terms of the perceptions of people wo are from
different countries as they would have lack of knowledge about the other country.
 It might over emphasise and underestimate the influence of the other country. This
can be seen in lacking behaviour of the colleagues or roommates or friends etc.
 There can be cross cultural conflicts which could lead to bigger fights later.
 In case if one single person is having cultural misunderstand experiences such as
calling out of names, or offensive language or degrading comments with respect to his
or her country, culture, religion or any background then a person might become
aggressive, upset, depressed or might go under emotional disturbance (K., 2014).
2. I saw a person at a travel destination where he was being teased because of his skin
colour which was the colour of chocolate and that is considered to be dark skinned by
many people across the world. Of course, the teasing people were of fair skin. I also
saw some people talking behind that person’s back about his culture or they thought
he came from a poor background and assumptions like that he is not educated enough
etc.
The outcomes of such incident was nothing much but I could see the irritation on the person’s
face who was being teased. It becomes difficult to stop each person saying that all the
assumptions those people were making or other people might make could be wrong. It is
about perception and how their brains are taught since their childhood. But yes a person does
feel bad and sometimes out of the community too (Gold, Colman, & Pulford, 2014).
3. I visited China for an official work and one of friends informed me that I will have to
check out the Ghost Festival which happens in China. It has the tradition to do the
prayers for all the ghosts and spirits. I was also carrying things for giving my regards
as prayers to the spirits but those things in my plate were not kept in the same place.
Then people started giving me cursed reactions which I felt bad about as I did not

know what went wrong. But I did not think about it much and moved on. Sudden
irritation was a normal reaction which came from me.

References
Gold, N., Colman, A. M., & Pulford, B. D. (2014). Cultural differences in responses to real-
life and hypothetical trolley problems. Judgement and Decision Maing, 9(1), 65-76.
K., K. (2014). Consequence of Cross Cultural Misunderstanding – A Shipboard Perspective.
Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 7(7), 6-9.