7.2: The ABCs of Culture Shock
Figure 7.2.1: Colorful A, B, C's
Culture shock is first and foremost an emotional response to a change in our cultural environment, but it also impacts how we act and how we think. The ABCs of culture shock refer to the affective, behavioral, and cognitive changes brought on by culture shock. The affective dimension of culture shock refers to the anxiety, bewilderment, and disorientation of experiencing a new culture. Oberg (1960) believed that due to a loss of familiar signs, culture shock produced an identity loss and confusion from the psychological toll exerted to adjust to a new culture. The behavioral dimension refers to confusion over the behaviors of people in the host culture. We don't understand why people are behaving the way they are in certain situations, and we are not sure how to act appropriately. The cognitive dimension refers to our inability to interpret our new environment or understand these "bizarre" social experiences.
For example, imagine that you are stepping into Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station or navigating the Paris Métro for the first time. The sheer volume of people, the speed of movement, and the expectation that you already know how to read signs and tap cards, combined with a fear of getting on the wrong train, can be overwhelming. For someone used to the solitude and control of driving in Los Angeles, public transportation abroad flips the script. Through the affective dimension, we can see that someone might feel disoriented by the new transportation system, which in turn can cause some anxiety and feelings of trepidation. The behavioral dimensions are exhibited in that we both have to change our behavior (adapt), and we may be baffled by the behaviors of others. For example, 750,000 passengers travel daily through the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, yet people rarely talk, and phone calls are considered disruptive. Last, the cognitive dimension is on display as visitors try to process the silence, with behaviors like not speaking on the train or avoiding eye contact may be misinterpreted as coldness or indifference, when it is actually a sign of respect. As a traveler, individuals need to rethink the meaning of social cues.
This kind of disorientation is a classic gateway into culture shock; it’s not just about transportation, but about how deeply held cultural values and practices shape everyday life. In the next section, we’ll explore the underlying factors that contribute to culture shock.
Underlying Factors Contributing to Culture Shock
Over the past several decades, there have been numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly studies documenting the effects of culture shock. The research suggests that nearly everybody who enters a new culture will experience some form of culture shock, but not everybody experiences culture shock the same way. How long culture shock lasts and the degree to which it is felt will vary according to several underlying factors, including motivations for travel, personal expectations, socio-cultural adjustment, and personal attributes.
Motivational Orientation
One of the most important factors is motivational orientation. Some people travel willingly and are excited to enter a new culture. Students who decide to study abroad, travelers who want to explore the world, and families who go on vacations provide a few examples. These groups generally have a high motivational orientation and generally have an easier time adapting to culture shock. By contrast, others enter a new culture reluctantly or unwillingly. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. These include refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people. To put that number in perspective, that is 1 out of every one hundred people on the planet. This is the highest number in human history, and it is only expected to grow as war and conflicts continue, and catastrophic climate change threatens to make many parts of the world uninhabitable in the near future. These people generally have a low motivational orientation as they do not want to leave their home cultures, but do so because their very survival depends on it.
Cultural Close-Up
When I was in graduate school in San Francisco, I took a semester off and traveled for 4 months through several Asian countries. On that trip, I met a German woman while on a boat from Sumatra to Malaysia. We traveled together up to Thailand before parting ways. Months later, she came to visit and later moved into my apartment in San Francisco. Eventually, we married and have been together ever since. But back in those days in San Francisco, we had a roommate who saw our relationship develop firsthand. He wasn't having much luck with the dating scene in San Francisco and decided that he, too, would like to meet a "European girl." So he set off for a month to Thailand and India, hoping he would find "the girl of his dreams." This anecdote speaks to another underlying factor, personal expectations. People with high expectations for their cultural experiences tend to struggle more with culture shock. Those who travel with an open mind and heart, who take the experiences as they come in a more spontaneous way, tend to adapt better. Needless to say, my former roommate did not find his ideal partner and returned home sharing more stories of frustrating experiences rather than enriching ones.
When we travel to a new culture, the cultural distance between our home culture and the host culture impacts our level of culture shock. This distance can be physical, but more importantly, cultural distance refers to the degree of difference in culture between the known, home environment and the new one. When we travel to destinations where people speak a different language, have different racial features, practice a different religion, and have significantly different customs and traditions, we typically feel a greater degree of culture shock. As someone born and raised in Northern California, I experienced much more culture shock when I traveled to India than when I visited Vancouver, Canada.
Tom Grothke, Exploring Intercultural Communication
Sociocultural Adjustment
Another factor that influences the degree of culture shock is sociocultural adjustment, which refers to the ability of the traveler to fit in and interact with members of the host culture. The level of sociocultural adjustment largely rests on the host's attitudes toward visitors to their culture. One attitude of hosts towards tourists is retreatism. Retreatism basically means that hosts actively avoid contact with tourists by looking for ways to hide their everyday lives. Tourists may not be aware of this attitude because the host economy may be dependent upon tourism. Such dependence could force the host community to accommodate tourists with tolerance. Hawaii is a place that depends heavily on tourism and often uses various forms of retreatism to cope with the tourist invasion. Several students have mentioned that, other than people who worked at restaurants or on tourist excursions, they didn’t see many locals when vacationing in Hawaii. Another attitude of hosts towards tourists is resistance. This attitude can be passive or aggressive. Passive resistance may include grumbling, gossiping about, or making fun of tourists behind their backs. Aggressive resistance often takes more active forms, such as pretending not to speak a language or giving incorrect information or directions. In the summer of 2025, there was a concerted effort across Southern Europe led by a network of activist groups to protest the touristification of their cities. Protesters used tools like water guns and water balloons to annoy travelers (Washington Post, June 16, 2025). In the summer of 2019, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau pledged to reduce the number of tourists, cutting cruise ships and limiting expansion of its airport. These actions came in response to an incredible surge of tourism. As The Guardian reported in 2016, the number of visitors making overnight stays in the city increased from 1.7 million in 1990 to more than 8 million in 16 years. That’s an astonishing increase for a city that is not as big as other European equivalents, such as Paris or London, and where many of the major tourist sites, such as Sagrada Familia and Parc Güell, are in residential areas where space to expand simply doesn’t exist. Further, traveling can be expensive, and travelers are often—but not always–more economically and socially privileged than their hosts. This dynamic can lead to power imbalances between hosts and tourists. Not all host attitudes are protective or negative. Some communities may capitalize on tourism and accept it as the social fabric of their community. Other communities actively invest money to draw tourists as a way to create economic well-being. This attitude is called revitalization. Residents do not always share equally in the revitalization, but sometimes it does lead to pride in the rediscovery of community history and traditions. Dolly Parton’s “Dollywood”, located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, was created as a way to revitalize a community that she loved, much as eco-tourism is a revitalizing force in Costa Rica.
Personality Attributes
Of course, individual personality attributes play a factor in how well one copes with culture shock. Generally speaking, people with greater tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity respond better to unknown and unanticipated experiences that occur when encountering other cultures. Those who are inflexible or set in their ways tend to struggle more with culture shock. Experience matters here. First-time travelers are likely to experience more culture shock simply because of the novelty of the situation. Experienced travelers have experienced culture shock in the past and have developed coping mechanisms when they find themselves in that situation again.
Cultural Close-Up
In 2017, I found myself hopelessly lost walking inside the Medina in Fez, Morocco. The Medina is a walled city formed in the 9th century. It is home to the oldest University in the world. The Medina consists of over 9,000 unmarked narrow alleyways. I had been walking for nearly 2 hours trying to get back to my guest house. I asked dozens of people for help, but due to language and cultural barriers, I was having no luck. I had been warned that tourists shouldn't walk through the Medina alone at night, and as night began to fall, I started to wonder if I would ever find my way out of that incredibly complex labyrinth. Fortunately, this wasn't my first rodeo, as the saying goes. I had previously traveled to 47 different countries on 5 continents. I hiked a volcano alone in the middle of the night in Panama, trekked to the glacial source of the Ganges River in India, sat beside burning human bodies at cremation ceremonies in Nepal, and endured harrowing bus rides on roads cut from cliffs in the Andes of Bolivia. Drawing on those past experiences, I didn't let culture shock get the best of me and eventually found my way back home.
Tom Grothke, Exploring Intercultural Communication
Figure 7.2.2: A tannery in the Medina, Fez, Morocco.
Figure 7.2.3: A pedestrian walkway in Suzhou, China. (CC BY; Tom Grothe)
Study Abroad
Culture shock has been studied extensively in connection with study abroad programs (see Kinginger, 2008; Salisbury, An, & Pascarella, 2013). Many students from across the globe take the opportunity to study at universities in other countries—whether through short summer or winter programs lasting 4 to 6 weeks, or longer stays like a full semester or more. In fact, California Community Colleges are increasingly investing in global education programs to expand access and support student success abroad. Students may participate as part of a group, through an exchange program, or independently. The European Erasmus Exchange Program has enabled large numbers of students from European countries to study and receive university credit at other universities in Europe. The kind of experience one has through study abroad varies considerably depending on the manner in which it is organized. Going abroad with a group from one's own culture and attending special university classes together limits the exposure to the target culture and its language. Organizing an independent study abroad experience is more difficult, as one must arrange oneself for university registration, selection of courses, and housing. In the process, however, one is likely to gain greater socio-cultural competence and more integration into the target culture and language. On the other hand, independent students lack the support system available to groups.
Figure 7.2.4: Students on a Butte College Study Abroad program learn the art of coffee cultivation in Costa Rica. ( CC BY; Tom Grothe)
Whether one engages in study abroad independently or as a member of a group, individual disposition/personality and the local context will determine the degree of success and personal satisfaction. Hua (2013) points out that many study abroad experiences result in an increase in oral proficiency in the target language and in intercultural understanding and competence. However, that varies tremendously depending on the individual. One might have the kind of limited exposure described here:
Her daily routine included attendance at required classes, after which she would go immediately to the study abroad center sponsored by her home university where she would stay until closing time, surfing the English language Internet and exchanging emails and Instant Messages with her friends and family in the U.S. Outside of service encounters, framed in various ways in her journal as threats to her well-being, she made little effort to engage speakers of French, limiting her use of the language to her courses. (Kinginger & Belz, 2005, p. 411)
In fact, the issue of technology in study abroad is controversial. Some have advocated a restricted use of technology while abroad, so as to maximize real-life contact with the members of the target culture (Doerr, 2013). Some programs go so far as to forbid the use of phones while participating in the program (Godwin-Jones, 2016). On the other hand, online access to home communities can be a tremendous help in psychological adjustment and in recovering from culture shock. Maintaining a blog, diary, or reflective journal provides a mechanism for sharing the experience and reflecting on what one discovers, as described in the last section of this chapter.
In addition to studying abroad, there are other avenues for university-age students to have meaningful, longer-term encounters with a foreign culture. There are opportunities to engage in volunteer services abroad, through government agencies, NGOs, or religious groups. One method that has a long history, particularly in Europe, is to serve as an "au pair", living with a host family and helping with childcare and other light domestic work. Working abroad in other capacities is possible as well, although finding appropriate jobs and obtaining necessary work permits, depending on the country, may be difficult. All these options carry with them the advantage of being a tourist or student in that they tend to offer more complete integration into everyday life in the foreign country. Living with a host family or entering into a working environment automatically supplies contacts with members of the culture. Particularly attractive are internships abroad, which, in addition to supplying cultural and work experience, offer the possibility of future employment.
Figure 7.2.5: Columbian working as an au pair.
Contributions and Attributions
Language and Culture in Context: A Primer on Intercultural Communication, by Robert Godwin-Jones. Provided by LibreTexts. License: CC-BY-NC
Intercultural Communication for the Community College, by Karen Krumrey-Fulks. Provided by LibreTexts. License: CC-BY-NC-SA
Exploring Intercultural Communication, by Tom Grothke. Provided by LibreTexts. License: CC-BY-NC-SA
