In interactions between people with different behavioural repertoires, communication
errors are more frequent than between people who speak the same language and follow
similar customs and habits. Nowadays, we tend to refer to such differences in behaviour
as differences in “culture”. In intercultural communication research and training,
this comes often with the presumption that those who grow up in another society as
ours somehow are unlike “us” psychologically. In this chapter, the point of departure
is that everyday interpretations of behavioural differences are influenced demonstrably
by our own ethnocentrism and systematic biases. An approach to intercultural training
(IT) is outlined with low emphasis on extensive psychological differences and high
emphasis on the actual context in which people live and on specific rules that only
hold in specific categories of situations. Implications of this approach are illustrated
with reference to an existing module on intercultural training.
