religious service. I’ve never been so confused. When to stand, when
to sit, what and when to sing – and that was in my own city!
When it comes to intercultural communication and eti-
quette things can be tricky. So much so that nearly everyone who
has traveled internationally has had an experience where they were
insulted, or have insulted someone completely unintentionally, or
were just plain baffled. The hotel group Swiss Hotel has an online
guide to help. They call it “The Ultimate Guide to Worldwide
Etiquette.”^11 You pick a country, and the website gives you informa-
tion on tipping, gestures, dining, and do’s and don’ts. What it
reveals is that there are lots of ways to mess up and there are
etiquette landmines everywhere. In the United States it’s just fine
to fill your own glass, not so in Turkey, China, and Egypt where it’s
more polite to fill the glasses of others. Finished your meal in Cuba
or Italy? Simply place your fork and knife on the right side of the
plate to let the server know you are done. Put themonyour plate in
Spain and Australia, but in South Africa that means you are still
eating. In Switzerland, tapping on your temple means “crazy” and it
means “clever” in the Netherlands (big difference). What’s more,
these customs can vary from situation to situation and from formal
to informal interactions.
With all of this going on it might be difficult to build friend-
ships and have positive non-blundering interactions with the peo-
ple you meet. I can understand how interacting with people across
cultures can create anxiety or step on toes.
It turns out that high sensation-seekers are really good at
just this kind of situation and they are more likely to seek out
intercultural interactions than low sensation-seekers. Why?
Intercultural encounters can be novel and ambiguous in nature
and HSSs are most interested in connecting with people who are
at least moderately different from them.^12 Sensation-seeking
predicts intercultural contact seeking. A positive attitude toward
people of other cultures leads to motivation to communicate
with them which leads to more experience. Intercultural com-
munications competence is related to high sensation-seeking in
both the effectiveness and the appropriateness of what the high
sensation-seekers do. Because high sensation-seekers have more
interest and empathy in people who are different from them, it
means that the high sensation-seekers listen more carefully,
which increases intercultural competency, especially in unfami-
liar settings.^13101 / The Relationships of High Sensation-SeekersDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:21:35, subject to the Cambridge