Why Is A Different Culture Difficult For Expatriates?

Imagine a large flat sheet of ice. Now, pour a spoon full of hot water on the ice. After it cools, you pour it off. It leaves an indentation where some of the ice melted. A while later you add another hot spoonful, close enough to the original location that the second water, flows into the indentation left by the first.

Continue placing in various locations, but eventually you will have a pattern of deeper holes, and courses where the water has followed its urge to follow gravity.

Now the next spoonful poured on the ice has only way to flow. The way it has always gone, the paths it has always taken are “right.” When we are born, our brains are similar to the original sheet of ice: clean, waiting to be melted into meaningful patterns that make sense of the world around us. As we experience the world, we recognize patterns, and shape our reality from these patterns and their resulting values and expectations.