Thirds of a feather flock together.” This JJfolk wisdom speaks of one of the basic human instincts—to identify and associate with an “in-group,” be it a tribe, a race, a nation, or a culture.

Human beings are social animals who desire to live in the company of others with a sense of shared identity. In this sense, the question of who we are as individu­als is inextricably linked to people with whom we share a common identity.

Often sidelined by the prevailing conflicts associated with group-based collective identi­ties, however, is the fact that, at the individual level, identity vis-a-vis a social group category is also a dynamic and pliable entity that can be negotiated, accommodated, and changed over time through extensive and cumulative inter- cultural experiences. Many urban centers pres­ent culturally diverse social contexts in which the natives, some of whom are themselves cul­turally and ethnically mixed, routinely come into face-to-face encounters with nonnatives. Such intercultural contacts and communica­tion experiences often lead to interpersonal relationships in which the very notion of in-group is blurred and changed. Furthermore, individuals of differing ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as immigrants and tem­porary sojourners, have amply demonstrated that individuals do cross group boundaries and manage their experiences of intercultural con­flict, and in the process, their identities evolve in the direction of greater complexity beyond the lines of conventional group categories.

In seeking to address these two questions by surveying pertinent literature, the focus of attention is placed on the microlevel phenome­non of direct contact and communication activ­ities involving individuals of dissimilar cultural backgrounds. Intercultural conflict is defined broadly as a state of stress or strain in intercul- tural relationship—a state that entails a degree of “either an explicit or implicit interpersonal struggle process” (Ting-Toomey, 2005a, p. 72). A similarly inclusive definition is applied to the term culture to refer not only to the shared life patterns associated with a society or nation but also to those patterns associated with distinct ethnic (including racial or language­based) groups within a society. Accordingly, any interpersonal encounter is considered “intercul- tural” whenever the interactants differ, or per­ceive themselves to be different from each other, in cultural or subcultural backgrounds. The term intercultural conflict is likewise employed to represent related terms such as interethnic, interracial, and intergroup conflict.