Culture Shock: Causes And Solutions

As today's world is shrinking into a "world village", more and more culturally disparate people come to contact with each other. Generally speaking, two different consequences appear as the result of the intercultural communication. On the one hand, there are benefits such as broadening the perspective, promoting personality growth and increasing the cultural sensitivity of the cross-cultural travelers; on the other hand, the travelers may experience the feeling of anxiety, confusion, disorientation, and even hostility due to misunderstanding of each other. "Culture shock" is used to refer to this phenomenon in which people involved in the communication feel discomfortable, depressed, frustrated or shocked.Culture shock is caused by a number of reasons. Generally, it may be caused by the confrontation of different value systems. Usually "hidden", value systems regulate people's behavior in an invisible way. People cannot feel the function of their value systems unless their values come into conflict with the other value system, which will cause them great shock. "Culture shock" may also be caused by the social skill deficit. When the cultural travelers act inappropriately in the unfamiliar culture, both sides of the communication will be shocked by the behaviors which seemimproper for a certain situation. Culture shock is also a consequence of the influence of life events, especially the negative ones. When people travel to another culture, their life will be undoubtedly changed. The changes in one's life habit will cause great discomfort to the people experiencing them. Among various life events, lack of social supP<0rt may have a great influence on people. The lack of supP<0rt from family members, friends and other familiar social networks will make the cultural travelers more vulnerable in the new environment, especially when they perceive the environment as very threatening.There are many methods to alleviate culture shock. Provision of . social supP<0rt is a feasible method. Cultural travelers tend to find supP<0rt from their family members, the co-nationals as well as from the locals or other foreigners in the host culture. SupP<0rt from these sources can have a buffering effect on the cultural travelers. Other methods aiming at culture learning - to learn the salient feature of the host culture and proper behaviors - include such intercultural training techniques as information-giving, the method of simulations, the critical incident technique, the method of culture assimilators and experiential learning by doing. The improvement of cultural sensitivities can also help reducing culture shock. However, it should be noted that culture shock is caused by a mixture of factors instead of a single reason. And the combination of shock-reduction methods will work better.In this paper, the author hopes to give some explanations on thecauses of culture shock and to proP<0se some methods to alleviate this phenomenon so as to improve the effectiveness of intercultural communication.