Becoming Interculturally Competent

Discovering the Sequence of Development

After years of observing all kinds of people dealing (or not) with cross-cultural situations, I decided to try to make sense of what was happening to them. I wanted to explain why some people seemed to get a lot better at communicating across cultural boundaries while other people didn’t improve at all, and I thought that if I were able to explain why this happened, trainers and educators could do a better job of preparing people for cross-cultural encounters.

The result of this work was the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) (M. Bennett, 1986, 1993; J. Bennett & M. Bennett, 2003, 2004). As people became more interculturally competent it seemed that there was a major change in the quality of their experience, which I called the move from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. I used the term “ethnocentrism” to refer to the experience of one’s own culture as “central to reality.” By this I mean that the beliefs and behaviors that people receive in their primary socialization are unquestioned; they are experienced as “just the way things are.” I coined the term “ethnorelativism” to mean the opposite of ethnocentrism–the experience of one’s own beliefs and behaviors as just one organization of reality among many viable possibilities.