As the world continues to shrink, one will likely encounter people from dif­ferent cultures.

Open travel between national borders, foreign trade, and other opportunities suggest that intercultural contact has become the norm and not an exception (Ting-Toomey, 2010). This chapter examines how features of culture correspond to intercultural conflict.

Culture refers to “a system of knowledge, meanings, and symbolic actions that is shared by the majority of the people in a society” (Ting-Toomey, 1994). Culture works to develop individual and community identities, as well as communicative behaviors, rites, and rituals among group members. Cultural members do not all share the same view of their culture (Keesing, 1974). Likewise, people have their own view of their culture. When people from different cultures interact, conflict likely emerges if neither person recognizes the other person’s cultural identity and beliefs. Intercultural conflict concerns perceived or actual incompatibility of cultural values, situational norms, goals, face orientations, scarce resources, proc­esses, and/or outcomes in a face-to-face (or mediated) context (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2001). This chapter discusses how conflict varies according to cultural variability factors.

Before we discuss intercultural factors that affect conflict, an observation should be made: Many researchers examine the role of culture by using nations. Instead of measuring if people differ on features of culture, researchers often assume that different nations represent cultural differences (e.g., Americans are competitive, whereas Koreans are cooperative). However, such is not necessarily the case. For example, Gudykunst, Matsumoto, Ting-Toomey, Nishida, Kim, and Heyman (1996) found that Japanese and South Korean participants differed from partici­pants who lived outside Asia. They also found that Australians used communica­tion styles similar to Americans, who live thousands of miles away. But Australians were quite different from their Asian neighbors. In other words, location is not equal to culture.

We now know that using the nation to represent culture provides an indi­rect and sometimes crude estimate of cultural variation. Using meta-analyses to summarize the research, Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeir (2002) found that underlying dimensions of culture explain behavior much more powerfully than differences between nations. This chapter will comment on how dimensions of culture can help explain intercultural conflicts.