Last week I was sitting alone in a café when a friend spotted me and came over for a chat. I told her that I had arranged to meet an overseas student at 2.00 but it was now 2.15 and I was about to give up waiting for him. She responded that people from other cultures have a different sense of time and suggested that I continue waiting. After 30 minutes, I phoned him to find out why he had not met me as arranged. He explained that his teacher had told him that I had wanted to meet on a different day and that our appointment would be rescheduled.

What I have described is the meeting of three different cultures. I am from Europe, my friend is from Africa, the student and his teacher are both from Asia. In multi-cultural environments such as Australia this is not an unusual situation and the potential for misunderstanding and cultural incidents is virtually unlimited.

In this scenario there are issues of time, relationships, rules and status with each party having a different cultural perspective. When we say 3 o’clock, it could be interpreted as a precise time or somewhere between lunch and dinner, perhaps tea time. This can be explained either as either synchronic time or sequential time. The relationships between the people in this example also vary depending on whose perspective you choose. I was discussing my schedule with the teacher as we have a specific relationship in a specific context whereas he believed that the student was included in a diffused relationship and shared our conversation with him. I felt universally bound by our appointment and would not change it without bilateral agreement; however, the student was happy to accept a unilateral change as he felt that the rules were particular and had since varied.

And, if the forgoing is not confusing enough, different cultures assign and honour status in different forms. Here we have the possible conflict of status ascribed by age, gender, social standing, education or professional standing, by a subjective measure of achievement or simply by having no regard for status at all. Thus there are many opportunities for the participants to become upset, disappointed, critical or angry. When you come to a new country, these sorts of misunderstandings happen all the time and leave you feeling quite lost. It may be hard to work out the truth, as truth so often has a cultural reference.

Those who settle quickest in new social environments are able to see the world through many perspectives. The first step towards gaining this insight is to understand your own cultural programming. Then, by eliminating the assumption that all other people are like us, we can accept the validity of a range of responses and begin to understand them. In your conversations with people from different origins, what assumptions do you make?