Humans are creatures of habit, much of which is shaped by culture. Culture, as a collectively shared knowledge system in a given population, provides its members implicit models of reality. When people are strangers in an unfamiliar culture, they are challenged to recognize taken-for-granted cultural scripts, undertake the process of new learning, and open themselves to changing, at least temporarily, some of their natural ways of being, doing, and acting. Over time, by engaging themselves in this process, they are able to form a relatively stable functional and psychological relationship with the host environment and an emergent identity orientation that is less cultural and more intercultural. This dynamic phenomenon is explained in Young Yun Kim’s integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation.

By placing adaptation at ...