VOCABULARY: MULTICULTURAL COUNSELING Achievement and ascription: Cultures differ in the way humans achieve status.

One way to describe this difference is in terms of achievement vs. ascription. Achievement: In these cultures people achieve status and respect from others on the basis of what they themselves have earned or created. Status can be changed and must be frequently demonstrated in order to retain it. Ascription: In ascription based cultures status comes from who you are, not from what you have done. Status is more easily retained and less subject to change. Attribution error, fundamental: The fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for behavior while under-valuing situational explanations. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. For example, when an employee fails to finish all assigned work, the supervisor blames the employee for being disorganized or lazy, instead of blaming the organization for eliminating jobs and assigning more work to the remaining employees. Cultural bias: People in individualist cultures, generally dominant-culture U.S. and northern European societies, highly value individualism, personal goals, and independence. People in collectivist cultures see individuals as members of highly valued groups such as families, tribes, work units, and nations, and tend to value group goals and interdependence; this cultural trait is common in Asia, traditional Native American societies, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin cultures. Research shows that culture, either individualist or collectivist, affects how people make attributions. People from individualist cultures are more inclined to make fundamental-attribution errors than people from collectivist cultures. Individualist cultures tend to attribute a persons behavior to his internal factors. Research suggests that individualist cultures engage in self-serving bias more than do collectivist cultures, i.e., individualists tend to attribute success to internal factors and to attribute failure to external factors. In contrast, collectivists engage in the opposite of self-serving bias-- i.e. self-effacing bias, which is attributing success to external factors and blaming failure on internal factors (the individual). Confirming & disconfirming communication & respect: Respect is a culturally bound experience; by this we mean the definition of respect or those behaviors defined as respectful changes from culture to culture. For people who do not understand that cultural differences run deeper than the use of different languages or the celebration of different holidays, CULTURAL VARIATIONS IN RESPECT CAN BE A MAJOR STUMBLING BLOCK IN COMMUNICATION. Often such people (person A, lets say) will deny that they treated another person (person B) disrespectfully, and given a mono-cultural frame of reference, their denial is true; they treated their conversational partner in a way that is deemed respectful in As culture. The person from culture A will be bewildered and hurt by Bs accusation; or they may respond by minimizing Bs experience: You shouldnt feel that way; we talk to everyone like that or We invited everyone the same way we sent a meeting notice with directions. The issue of respect is related to the concepts of confirming and disconfirming communication. Briefly paraphrased, confirming communication is any behavior that causes another person to value himself more; disconfirming communication is behavior that causes people to value themselves less (Tubbs & Moss, 1987). Expanding this definition to the realm of intercultural communication, one can define respect and disrespect: Respect: Behaviors that cause people to feel that they and their cultural viewpoints, norms, and experiences are valuable, and their contributions are sought out.
vocabulary 2013

Disrespect: Behaviors that demonstrate the individual and cultural experiences of a participant are not felt to be important, welcome, or valid.
Tubbs, S.L. & Moss, S. (1987). Human Communication (5th ed.). New York: Random House.

Culture: "the ever-changing values, traditions, social and political relationship and worldview created and shared by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors that include a common history, geographic location, language, social class, and/or religion, and how these are transformed by those who share them. Thus, it includes not only tangibles such as food, holidays, dress, and artistic expression, but also less tangible manifestations such as communication style, attitudes, values, and family relationships." Ever changing Worldview Transformed Social Created and shared Tangible Political Group Intangible Relationship Multiple factors

Ortuno, M. M: Values and education in the emerging multicultural society: Awareness and fairness. In Russo, K. (2000). (Ed.). Finding the middle ground: Insights and applications of the values orientations method. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Quoted by Ortuno from Nieto, S. (1995). The sociopolitical context of multicultural education. 2nd edition. New York: Longman. Pg.138.

Culture: The shared values, norms, traditions, customs, arts, history, and institutions of a group of people. This includes their worldview and definitions of reality. The collective programming of the human mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another. Culture determines the identity of a human group in the same way as personality determines the identity of an individual. (Hofstede, 1980). The effect of culture on our lives is largely unrealizedmany of the influences culture has had on us have become buried in the primitive portions of our brain beneath the neocortex, where they are largely below our levels of awareness. (Samovar, Porter, and Jain, 1981). Cultural Adaptation: Anyone experiencing the necessity of working and living in a culture other than the one in which they were primarily socialized is faced with a demand to adapt to that culture. This is necessary in order to work, live, and function with some degree of competence and comfort. High degrees of adaptation can coexist with very low levels of assimilation. Adaptation is simply acquiring knowledge and a set of skills that allow the person to function competently in the second culture. Cultural Assimilation: The process of giving up the values, beliefs, and life patterns of ones original culture and adopting those of another. Cultural Awareness: Realization of and respect for the fact that people of other cultural groups may have a radically different set of values and conception of reality. Cultural awareness also implies a degree of willingness to adapt ones behavior to the beliefs of others. Cultural Competency: Cultural competency is a complex set of attitudes, skills, and levels of awareness that allow an individual (or an agency) to interact with clients and employees in ways that are appropriate, respectful, and relevant to the person and/or community being served. Cultural competency also involves the willingness and ability to design services in ways that are culturally appropriate. (A) Attitudes include the ability to experience and observe cultural differences without automatically judging them based solely on ones own cultural norms and values. It includes accepting that ones intent when interacting with others is less important than its effect on the other person. 2

(B) Awareness of behaviors or meanings appropriate to other cultures is a process that rests on development of cultural self-awareness. This involves surfacing and becoming able to monitor ones own cultural preferences, assumptions, and expectations. It includes understanding the effect that enactment (operating from those cultural preferences, assumptions and expectations) may have on people whose culture is different than ones own. (C) Skills include the ability to change ones own behavior to more closely fit the norms of the person we are interacting with, and to evaluate their behavior based on their cultural norms, not entirely on ones own. Ethnicity: a group classification in which members share a unique social and cultural heritage, passed on from one generation to the next. Ethnicity is often mistakenly assumed to have biological or genetic foundation. Ethnocentrism: Applying the standards of ones own culture to other peoplejudging their behavior by our rules. Seeing ones own cultural view as central to reality. Ethnorelativism: An attitude espousing the validity of all races, nations, ethnic groups and cultures. Includes the ability to evaluate behavior in a culturally appropriate way. Generalization: A statement about a group, which cannot be validly applied to an individual without experience of that individual. It can be visualized as a normal statistical curve. It is a statement about the 66.67 % that falls within two standard deviations on the normal curve. Intent vs. Effect: This refers to a common perceptual and definitional difference between people of color and people of the dominant group. People of color will often call an action racist if its effect on a group of people is discriminatory. The dominant group often will not define an action as racist unless the person or group the action originates from intends the action to be racist. Minority: A group whose power and influence in the culture is less than would be expected according to their numbers in the population; a disempowered group. Racism: a. The belief that human races have distinctive characteristics that determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that ones own race is superior and has the right to rule others. b. A policy of enforcing such asserted right. c. A system of government and society based upon it. To the aspects above may be added: d. Perpetuation of a belief in the superiority of the white race. e. Prejudice plus power. People of color: A general term used to refer to the majority of the world population who are not of Caucasian racial descent. Prejudice: a. An unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason. b. Any preconceived opinion or feeling, either favorable or unfavorable. c. Unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, especially of a hostile nature, directed against a racial, religious, or national group. Prescriptive / descriptive values: Prescriptive values are those espoused by a given culturehow people should be, the ways things are supposed to operate, etc. Descriptive values outline how people in a given culture actually behave in a typical situation. Behavior may or may not match the culturally prescribed ideal or prescriptive value. 3

Releasing responses: An important intercultural communication principle is: Remember that it is more important to release the right responses in others than it is to send what you think are the right messages. This is related to the idea of action chains, defined as: A fixed sequence of events in which people alternately release appropriate responses in each other in order to achieve an agreed-upon or predictable goal. (Hall & Hall, 2000). Respect: Behaviors that cause people to feel that they and their cultural viewpoints, norms, and experiences are valued, and their contributions are sought out. Disrespect: Behaviors that demonstrate the individual and cultural experiences of a participant are not felt to be important, welcome, or valid. Adapted from Tubbs, S.L. & Moss,
S. (1987). Human Communication (5th ed.). New York: Random House.

Stereotype: Refers to ways of thinking about a group of people that mask any individual differences in the way those group members believe, think, and act. Whether favorable or unfavorable, a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a category. Its function is to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category (Allport, 1994).