Predicting Intercultural Sensitivity

Written by Sofie Skovfoged Gregersen.

This is a summary of an article that deals with the concept of intercultural sensitivity – can we use personality properties to predict the level of intercultural sensitivity in people?

“Empathic Tendency, Majority Culture Representation, and Political Conservatism as Predictors of Intercultural Sensitivity” by Ferat Yılmaz, Hanifi Şekerci and M. Cihangir Doğan (2018) – the article can be read here

This article explores the concept of intercultural sensitivity – a concept that is becoming increasingly important in a world that becomes more interconnected and more intercultural for each day that passes. Being sensitive to cultural differences is important, especially in multicultural environments where people of different cultural backgrounds co-exist and learn together. In order to foster intercultural understanding, we must have respect and empathy towards one another. But what predicts how interculturally sensitive we are?

This piece of research examines to what extent certain variables predict intercultural sensitivity. They explore an individuals’ empathetic, egocentric and sympathetic tendencies, level of political conservatism and level of ‘beloning to the majority culture’ each and in conjunction work to predict the level of intercultural sensitivity in the individual. Researchers have many different ways of measuring intercultural sensitivity in people – in this article, sensitivity is highly connected with emphatetic tendency, and the researchers predicted that a high level of empathy would go along with a high level of intercultural sensitivity – which turned out to be true!

The article also equates high levels of political conservatism with a lower level of intercultural sensitivity – and perhaps this doesn’t come as a surprise to many people? Looking at the rise of the far right on polititical scenes worldwide, it is clear that we are fostering a lack intercultural awareness and perhaps also of intercultural competence. We also see a tendency in shutting off for intercultural encounters across borders, as we work to close our borders to the people whose cultures ‘are too far from our own’. There is a clear need to minimize our egocentrical tendencies and tend to our empathetic tendencies if we wish to become interculturally competent and sensitive to cultural differences, in turn creating cultural and ethnic diversity.

References:

Yılmaz, F., Şekerci, H. and Doğan, M. 2018. “Empathic Tendency, Majority Culture Representation, and Political Conservatism as Predictors of Intercultural Sensitivity”, Journal of Intercultural Communication 48