Sunday 11 August 2013

Spaceflight and the Culture Assimilator

As spaceflights became more international and crews more multicultural, cultural awareness and sensitivity became one of the skills required for astronauts. Finding the right balance is crucial since overlooking cross-culturality might lead to cultural insensitivity and exaggerating it might promote stereotyping.
An approach to cross-cultural training (used in astronauts' training) is the so-called culture assimilator which consists of 100 to 200 scenarios where people from two cultures interact. Each scenario is followed by several explanations of why the member of the "other" culture acted in a specific way. The learner selects one explanation and then gets feedback for the chosen explanation. Trainees, after a while, start selecting explanations of the others' behaviour that are closer to the others' culture. In other words, the trainees' attributions become more specific, more complex, and less ethnocentric (Draguns & Harrison, 2011).

 

- Draguns, J. G. & Harrison, A. A. (2011) Spaceflight and Cross-Cultural Psychology. Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective; edited by Vakoch, D. A., 177-194
- Space age fashion à la Pierre Cardin, photograph via

10 comments:

  1. Hahaha! There it is! Great!

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  2. Hi Sam, I've just seen your comment on my previous post ;-) As you might already tell I'm quite lousy at hiding how much I'm fond of everything that is related to space...

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  3. Another great share, darling! The photo is cracking grand.

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    1. Thank you, Karen - the photo is one of my favourite ones.

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  4. Absolutely fabulous headgear, off we go to the stars!

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    1. The headgear is really fabulous ... pure space age.

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  5. Replies
    1. And as Derek pointed out, unfortunately these shots are rather rare. But maybe that makes them even more glorious ;-)

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  6. Those kind of photos are rare, rare beasts. Glorious shot, exactly.

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    1. Thanks for passing by, Derek, and a wonderful good morning!

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