The most crippling, and most modifiable, barrier to good intercultural relations

It’s the million dollar question. Why do our intercultural relationships fall down, often before they’ve even stood up?

If we could drill this down to its essence, we might be able to do something about it. Then everything will be smooth sailing... right? Well, yes and no.

Like everything to do with human relationships, it’s complicated.

Even through all the complications and the messiness, there remains one key mistake that is, we reckon, the most common, the most crippling and the most modifiable of the intercultural relationship barriers.

It’s called ethnocentrism, and we all do it.

In the simplest terms, ethnocentrism is the preference for one’s own cultural norms. We all do it because our cultural norms are, among other things, the basis of our beliefs, our values, our identity and therefore our entire framework for relating to ourselves and to others. Our psychic survival depends on our preference for our own norms. So, in fact, ethnocentrism’s a very healthy thing. How then, can it be bad news?

Ethnocentrism becomes unhealthy when we go too far in allowing it to inform our conclusions about the norms of other cultures. When our values tell us the values of another are inferior, our culture has become our yardstick for evaluating other cultural practices. In doing so, we have come to regard our own norms as innately superior. When we make this common mistake, we inevitably come to believe that the solution to our shared problem lies in our counterpart taking on our cultural norms. That is assimilation, which is a practice history tells us has remarkably bad results for the target population.

Take, for example, the Stolen Generations - those thousands of First Nations people who were the subject of state intervention to raise Indigenous people’s living standards through their genetic and cultural absorption into the wider population. This was most famously enacted through child removal, on the grounds this would improve the welfare of First Nations people.

The unspeakable suffering most of those children subsequently experienced in the institutions and foster homes that housed them have led to tragic consequences. Life trajectory studies show that Stolen Generation members fare much worse than their Indigenous counterparts on every single indicator of wellbeing, including mental health, illicit drug use, imprisonment and disconnection from family and culture. 'Worse than their Indigenous counterparts’ means much, much worse than the rest of us.

Because Indigenous child removal was based on good intentions, many non-Indigenous people today continue defending the actions of the time, and were strongly opposed to a national apology to the Stolen Generations. First Nations people argue that to try to eradicate a people’s culture, because of the ethnocentric view that our own culture is superior, is toxic at best and at worst genocidal. Whatever your view, we have to appreciate here now that good intercultural relationships don’t grow from the ethnocentric idea that our norms are actually superior.

There’s also growing and compelling evidence in the psychiatric academic literature demonstrating how imposing cultural norms on another more than doubles their risk of experiencing a psychotic episode.

Since ethnocentrism is something we all do, how might we better know what our it looks like, and how might we come to recognise when it might be toxic? Simple, really. By seeking knowledge of ourselves, and our culture, we begin to unravel our toxic notions of cultural superiority.

Where to seek that knowledge? High quality, evidence based intercultural competence training that maintains the integrity of our cultural norms, while validating and accepting norms of others, offers us the best way to start that journey.

Growing our appreciation of the values of others - while holding true to our own values and beliefs - is Cultural Flexibility in action, and it’s cultural training as it should be.

Begin your journey today.

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