By: Riley Koerner Edited By: Lydia Doss

We’ve all done it. We’ve all taken one look at someone from another country and made a quick assessment about what personality and characteristics they would most likely have according to their country’s stereotypes. If you met someone from Japan at a business conference, you might assume they would be more reserved and less likely to take an aggressive stand, which reflects a collectivist conflict style. Likewise, if someone from Japan were to interact with an American, they might perceive the American as harsh and aggressive, which reflects an individualistic conflict style. By doing this, it could lead to unnecessary conflict and misconceptions. Contrary to what most people think, it is possible for a person to change his/her conflict style through the blending of two distinct cultures, or acculturation.

Moving to a new country that doesn’t have the same ways of handling conflict one is accustomed to can be intimidating. Usually, people assume that people from other cultures will always stick to their own cultural rules and customs when dealing with conflict, but that turns out not to be the case. According to the research of Tara Emmers-Sommer, a professor of Communications at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the amount of media consumed, whether it be U.S. or non-U.S. media, has a noticeable effect on the conflict style of an individual. She surveyed foreign exchange students and American students at her university on their social media, television, and reading habits in order to get her study published in The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research.

She found that the more media an individual consumed from the country they were in, the more they took on a more individualistic mindset. This is interesting because one would think that if a person were consuming more media produced from a collectivist country, they would shift to a more collectivist mindset, yet Emmers-Sommer found that media in general produced a more individualistic conflict style. This is probably because the underlying base of all media is more individualistic – that is, it benefits and caters to an individual’s wants more than a community’s shared desires.

Emmers-Sommer also discovered that those who came from a collectivist background were more likely to change their conflict styles and integrate other conflict styles than those who came from an individualistic background. This might be due to the fact that collectivists hold importance to benefiting the group they’re a part of. It would make sense for them to conform to a conflict style that is better suited to the context to ensure they fit in and did not create more disruption. While individualists did report changing their conflict style to fit the situation, they did not change as frequently and fully as their collectivist counterparts.

But what if the foreigner is not an avid media user? Will they still be able to change their conflict styles if they aren’t immersed in their country’s media? Following the research of Günter Bierbrauer, a professor and researcher at the University of Osnabrück, conflict contexts play a big role in which conflict style one chooses to use to handle the situation.

Bierbrauer performed an interview with Turks, who follow a collectivist mindset, who had been living in Germany, an individualistic country. Bierbrauer sought to figure out if different conflict situations would elicit a different conflict management style among the Turks. They were given scenarios concerning marital issues, unsuccessful attempts to get a new apartment, taking responsibility for scratching a neighbor’s car, and handling disrespect from their children. Interestingly enough, different conflict contexts resulted in the Turks dealing with the conflicts in different ways. Following Bierbrauer’s results, when the Turks dealt with conflicts with other Germans, they changed their usual collectivist conflict style to a more individualistic one to match how the German’s handled situations. When dealing with other Turks, however, they tended to keep their collectivist conflict strategies.

While the nationality of the person whom the Turk was interacting with affected their conflict management style, so did whether or not they were dealing with tangible or intangible topics. Bierbrauer found that one deals with conflicts pertaining to tangible objects (money, job, etc.) in a more individualistic style. This is because the government of the country controls the tangible objects, so one has to take a more aggressive and straightforward approach to handling them. Contrastingly, when the Turks were dealing with intangible objects, like family honor, they reverted back to their collectivist conflict management strategies. While the Turks took on different “sides” when in different conflict contexts, Bierbrauer found that most of the Turks actually blended both styles to create a bicultural conflict style.

Both Emmers-Sommer and Bierbrauer’s studies show just how acculturation can affect an individual’s conflict style. Not only is one fully capable of changing one’s conflict style, but one is also able to regulate and blend conflict styles to match the situation one is in. If more people understood that the culture one is born in doesn’t define how they’ll react in every situation, then fewer conflicts would arise due to stereotyping. These results also show businesses that most of the foreigners applying for positions in the company would be able to keep up with the pace and customs they might encounter. So next time you find yourself placing someone into a mold you’d think they’d fit in to, remember that your background does not define you, and that people are fully capable of meeting the situation at hand.