Intercultural Competence® framework

In uncertain and fast-moving multicultural realms we have to consider the dynamic co-emergence of an individual and it’s environment: ‘Living beings shape the world into meaningful domains of interaction and thereby bring forth their own environments of significance and valence’ (Thompson, 2007, 154). Particularly in regard to ‘Western’ consumer societies, new values have emerged over the last decades questioning the pillars of capitalism. Altruistic ideas, such as ‘social responsibility’, ‘accountability’ and the ‘common good’ have moved into the limelight of societies and have changed more traditional ideas about the role of advertising. It is argued here that an integrated perceptual architecture has to be functional on an individual level in order to stimulate change for the social good through products (for example, advertising campaigns). To elaborate on this we draw on selected ideas from the bio-cultural framework of Intercultural Competence® (Breninger, 2020) linking cultural expertise to actions that are informed by a genuine pursuit of creating more caring, equal and just societies.

Intercultural Competence® (in short: ICC®) is an enactive framework claiming that if a fully functional PACA-system (that is, highly interlinked perceptive-affective-cognitive-action systems) regarding cultural otherness (that is, people and objects or events) is in place, the actions (and as we argue here also the acts of creation) by the individual will be informed by pro-sociality. An enactive view takes into account lived (culturalised) experiences and reflexivity by trying to provide an all-inclusive framework to articulate the numerous domains and levels of organisation claimed here to be involved and interacting for intercultural competence and ethical creativity. The unique facet of the Intercultural Competence® framework is that it is built on enactive theorems and hence bound to actions. One of the main hypotheses is that genuinely interculturally competent people regularly ‘walk the talk’ since they have integrated interculturality as a value on a neural level and have to act accordingly even in adverse settings. In ICC® intercultural competence is:

1. based on the neurobiological integration of cultural otherness in individuals; and

2. conceived as intersectional – that is, it necessitates the convergence of other dynamic processes, such as moral and gender expertise as well as creativity.

According to the Intercultural Competence® framework, cultural expertise (used synonymously with ‘intercultural competence’) requires a functional architecture of the PACA-system in regard to cultural otherness, that is, various cultural others (people) and cultural differences (objects, events, tasks and so forth) in order to develop the relevant neurobiological underpinnings for the relevant mental and social processes. This distinction between people and objects/events is crucial since the so called ‘social brain’ (that is, people are ‘wired for WE’) encodes and processes human beings in different ways (cf. Northoff, 2016). It is further claimed that integration of culturalised experience and knowledge in the PACA-system leads to understanding, and – in time, through habitualisation and neural interconnection – to cultural expertise.

In the Intercultural Competence® (ICC®) framework cognition is approached in an enactive and dynamic way, which means that the (living) organism is characterised as complex, self-organising, context-dependent, vastly variable, yet patterned and recurrent. In this context ethical creativity has to be developed from the person’s experiences and actions (especially interactions and coactions with other people) in various situations and contexts via the neural integration of cultural otherness. ICC® builds on recent data from cultural neuroscience, pertaining that culture is embrained (cf. Northoff, 2016). The idea of an embrainment of culture (Northoff, 2016) propagates that the repeated engagement in a specific set of cultural tasks leads to a ‘cultural conditioning of the brain’, which again results in a certain expertise in decoding and encoding of the same compared to other culture members and tasks. It is further suspected that cultural expertise is largely based on familiarity with not only a stimulus (for example, a person) but also the stimulus in a specific situative context (cf. Northoff, 2016, 33). Hence, when it comes to ‘seeing’ the world, context, situation and change is everything – an enormous future challenge for experimental designs. Northoff’s (2016, 33) idea of an encoding of sociocultural statistics into the brain’s neural activity is crucial for ICC®. He argues that not only the encoding of the frequency distribution of stimuli (and thus natural statistics) is central in generating neural activity, but that various data also show that the same stimuli are processed in different ways in different contexts:

The generated neural activity may then be based not only on the natural statistics of our target stimulus but also on its co-occurrence with other stimuli in its social and cultural context – its sociocultural statistics. In short, the brain may encode both the natural statistics and the sociocultural statistics of stimuli into its neural activity. (Northoff, 2016, 34)

This means, for example, that an individual’s history of perceptions gives her/him a socio-cultural database, a kind of foundational bias, on which s/he builds her/his assumptions. With the help of such assumptions people evaluate other people and situations. What’s unsettling there is that the power of stereotypes and prejudice, for example, seems to be already rooted in perception.

The enactive idea that one learns to coordinate one’s experience by coordinating one’s behaviour in respect to others is pivotal to ICC®. This means that we are not dealing with detached, culturalised individuals who try to figure out or judge cultural difference, but need to address sense-making in interaction as a structured and at the same time structuring process (see De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). Therefore we argue that analysing the interlinkedness between individual minds and socio-cultural settings (situations and contexts) at various levels means to analyse perceptions, since they are already entrenched with relevant experiences biasing the individual mind and the opinions and decisions of the respective communities. This, of course, leaves us with the big question: how can we analyse changing, culturalised perceptions?

In the Intercultural Competence® framework it is proposed that a ‘new way of seeing’, that is, a specific perceptual architecture, emerges from the convergence of various sets of expertise (as, for example, morality, gender and creativity). Such processes are supported by a vast amount of enacted understanding in specific (professional) as well as unspecific (private) contexts. The resultant ‘new way of seeing’ is based on a basic change in perception in regard to the main axis of cultural otherness (Breninger, 2020). Cultural expertise (that is, intercultural competence as defined in ICC®) is conceived as the successful integration level of relevant experiences of cultural others (people) and cultural differences (events and objects) in various situations and contexts into the dynamical PACA-system. Regarding expertise the integrative Intercultural Competence® framework outlines three basic levels of perceptual change as well as two transitory stages (T1 and T2) between them (cf. Breninger, 2020):

1. ethnocentric – one’s own culturalised view is perceived to be the only viable and ‘normal’ one;

2. ethnorelative – one does accept the existence of other viable perspectives; and

3. intercultural – one is able to integrate various perspectives into a novel way of seeing and meaning making.

In Figure 1 below the three phases – ethnocentric (EC), ethnorelative (ER) and intercultural (IC) – as well as the transitory phase 1 between EC and ER (T1) and transitory phase 2 (T2) are depicted.

Figure 1

Intercultural Competence® framework.

We argue here that initiating socio-cultural change, as, for example, advertising for the social good, necessitates creativity – or rather, a certain kind of creativity, referred to as ‘ethical creativity’ in the Intercultural Competence® framework. Novel practices result from the interactions of people that require changes on an individual level (neural and mental mechanisms). According to the Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro) of the Intercultural Competence® framework (Breninger, 2020), an intercultural individual has been highly motivated to act and has a long history of acting in interculturally competent ways (that is, habitualisation). Therefore, s/he can, and is intrinsically motivated to, ‘deviate into new perceptions’ (Lotto, 2017, 15) and act creatively, for example, regarding decision making and problem solving in multicultural settings. Since people have different values mediating their utilisation of competences, it is important to evaluate the core competences intersectionally (as, for example, culture, ethics and creativity) on an individual level to determine to what extent integration has happened. This would allow us to assess the people who are genuinely able to create for the social good.

Culture and Creativity Model

In the Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro) (Breninger, 2020), ‘ethical creativity’ is regarded as a dynamic process emerging through the interaction and co-activation of creative and benevolent, moral mindsets in a specific situation and context. In the CuCro creative mindsets are prompted by ‘real perception’ enabling the individual to break out of what is considered conventional thinking styles and habituated affective as well as behavioural patterns in a specific situation¹ Moral mindsets are considered as dependent on the level of integration of cultural others (that is, people) and cultural differences (that is, events, tasks or objects) in the highly interconnected PACA-system (that is, highly interlinked perceptive-affective-cognitive-action systems) of an individual. The level of integration of cultural differences and others established (ethnocentric, ethnorelative, intercultural) entails the likelihood of certain moral mindsets (self-oriented, familiar difference-oriented and unfamiliar difference oriented) to be more regularly activated:

• the self-oriented mindset in ethnocentric individuals;

• the difference-oriented mindset towards the ‘familiar other’ in ethnorelative individuals; and

• the difference-oriented mindset towards the ‘unfamiliar other’ in intercultural individuals.

Hence, the CuCro claims that individuals are more likely to engage in ‘benevolent’ rather than ‘malevolent’ creativity towards cultural others the more fully the experiential integration of cultural differences and cultural others is established in the dynamic PACA-system. One can, of course, perform from a ‘malevolent’ or ‘benevolent’ creative mindset at any given time, however, since for an individual the pattern of moral mindset shifting represents her/his history of social experience and practice (Narvaez, 2014, 195), ethical creativity is very much dependent on the habituated co-activation of the undergirding moral and creative mindsets. Nevertheless, ethical creativity is enabled if the experiential integration of cultural differences and cultural others has been functionally set up in terms of direct experiences and the knowledge constructed by an individual.

It is important to emphasise that mindsets are not understood as ability-beliefs that individuals hold, like, for example, Carol Dweck (2006) does when she refers to such beliefs as ‘self-theories’ or ‘mindsets’. In the Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro) the initial idea of cognitive psychology to conceptualise mindsets as ‘the sum total of the activated cognitive procedures’ (Gollwitzer and Bayer, 1999, 405) is abandoned for a more enactive conception of mindsets. The Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro) uses Darcia Narvaez’s (2014, 195) definition of mindset that outlines mindsets to encompass:

1. an explicit, wilfully generated cognitive repertoire that an individual applies to people and situations; as well as

2. an implicit mind-body-emotion tendency including interpretative framing and preparation for action that one embraces more habitually on an unconscious level.

In order to differentiate between cognitive development and cognitive rigidity, the ICC® draws on Carol Dweck’s (2006) distinction between:

1. fixed mindsets or ‘entity’ mindsets: the ability is static and cannot improve; and

2. growth mindsets or ‘incremental’ mindsets: the ability can increase with effort.

It is claimed that only growth mindsets can promote moral upshifting to the next phase (from ethnocentric, to ethnorelative to intercultural).

In the Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro), action is again directly linked to perception, which in turn is influenced by the active creative mindset. The idea of when a particular category of creative magnitude is active (for example, Big C, little c and so on), how this creative mindset iteratively influences and shapes the perceptual architecture in regard to cultural otherness is pivotal here. When mindsets shift, attention, automaticity, cue perception, filters, experiences, situations and goals are affected in certain ways. Hence, in this context the question is, how perception does change or can change considering the underlying active mindsets. In the Culture and Creativity Model (CuCro), it is suggested that mundane and routine styles of perception regarding cultural differences and others must be abandoned and more flexible, divergent and difference-oriented mindsets need to be activated. The problematic proclivity towards routinised ‘groupthink’ (Janis, 1972) and ‘mindless thought processes’ (that is, automatic, unengaged thinking; see Langer, 1978) and how they are destabilised by, for example, divergent thinking, has been analysed umpteen times. In the CuCro, however, it is claimed that perception lies at the heart of such processes and hence of creativity. In order to analyse perception in this context, David Bohm’s distinction between habits of ‘mechanical perception’ and ‘real perception’ is adopted (2004) Bohm regards mechanical perception as preconceived ideas and learning that emanates simply from learning for specific utilitarian purposes. Real perception, on the other hand, is conceptualised to encompass the capability of seeing something new and unfamiliar. Hence, Bohm’s conception of creativity is that the person must be able to learn and see something new and not simply impose preconceptions:

[…] in a creative act of perception, one first becomes aware (generally non- verbally) of a new set of relevant differences, and one begins to feel out or otherwise to note a new set of similarities, which do not come merely from past knowledge, either in the same field or in a different field. This leads to a new order, which then gives rise to a hierarchy of new orders, that constitutes a set of new kinds of structure. The whole process tends to form harmonious and unified totalities, felt to be beautiful, as well as capable of moving those who understand them in a profoundly stirring way. (Bohm, 2004, 20)

This quote presages the ‘weaving together’ of textures (perception-affect-cognition-action systems) into a single, functional fabric, referred to as the PACA-system in Intercultural Competence®. Individuals do not bring things together that are far apart in their processing of information, which led Beau Lotto (2017, 215) to the statement that ‘there is nothing creative about creativity’, because what people see is just a history of their past perceptions. Lotto further advocates that people see the meaning of the information and not the information. That is why he refers to information as meaningless: ‘Our assumptions create the light in which we are able to see differently – or not, depending on how strongly we avoid exploring the shadows where keys to new paths may be hiding’ (40). Lotto conceives of creativity as a very basic process that begins with the process of questioning such assumptions (215). Bohm, however, alludes to the idea of ‘feeling out’ for new differences. The idea that this emergent ‘feeling’ then leads to new orders and finally to a new structure is very much in line with enaction.

The CuCro draws on Bohm’s ideas, claiming that individuals tend to be more ‘mechanical’ in perception when it comes to cultural otherness even though ‘real’ perception would be called for in order to be creative in their actions, that is, for example, to accomplish creativity in decision-making or problem-solving. Hence, the CuCro regards activating the more subtle capacity for original and creative perception in regard to cultural otherness as one of the key abilities in setting up an intercultural perceptual architecture. Bohm (2004, 30–32) further points to the challenge that, in order to become creative, one has to start noticing that the majority of actions by the individual and the society are in fact rather delicately limited by largely tacit and essentially mechanical constraints (that is, habitually applied preconceptions and prejudices). Bohm considers originality and creativity not as a result of an effort to achieve, for example, ‘creative competence’ or a decision that can be made, but ‘rather as a by-product of a mind that is coming to a more nearly normal order of operation’ (Bohm, 2004, 32).

In short, the CuCro considers the dynamic process of ethical creativity as emergent from the interaction and co-activation of benevolent, moral and creative mindsets, which are dependent on the level of integration of cultural otherness into the highly interconnected PACA-system of an individual in a specific situation and context. We propose here that ethical creativity is linked to the product resulting from the actions taken by the individual who manages to co-activate these mindsets. We refer to individuals here as C+ subjects if they have habitually co-activated moral and creative mindsets when integrating cultural otherness (that is, people and objects) and have acted upon it in several situations and contexts. C+ subjects are expected to come up more regularly with culturally sensitive ideas and products that result from enacting ethical creativity. Analysing the interlinkedness between individual minds and socio-cultural contexts at various levels means to analyse perceptions of real-world issues in a specific situation and culturalised environment.

It is important to note here that we do not talk about creativity being imposed on or into ethics or vice versa. Rather, moral and creative mindsets interact in various ways and affect each other over the integration of cultural otherness. In this process, they change the properties of each other: the individual involved, the situation, the wider socio-cultural context affected and so forth. This is why C– individuals in an organisation (see Figure 2) tend to indirectly or directly conceive and promote discriminatory campaigns. The C– subjects have not managed to integrate cultural expertise as a value and have a history of flawed or default decision making when it comes to the intersections of culture, ethics and creativity. It is deemed rather unlikely that C– subjects are able to create, for example, advertising campaigns for the human good.

Figure 2

C+ and C– organisations: Use of culture and communications.

In short, the idea of ‘ethical creativity’ is that a functional perceptual architecture is set up by the respective individual over time. This leads to a ‘new way of seeing’ supported by various value-informed processes (that is, various sets of expertise that have been integrated over several situations and contexts across the axis of cultural otherness). These processes need to converge for ethical creativity to emerge. In order to empirically put this idea to test an intersectional, perceptuo-cognitive experimental pilot was designed in an attempt to document the relevant perceptual architecture.

The unique link between perception and action theorised in the enactive Intercultural Competence® framework is the reason for using visual data (eyetracking) combined with cognitively penetrated data (questionnaire) for the experimental pilot. The idea that the physical mode of ‘seeing’ and the culturalised, social mode of ‘seeing’ are inextricably interwoven in the phenomenon of perception lies at the heart of it. What is in general referred to as ‘perception’ is the subjective experience that results from stimulation of the senses by the environment. Since the perceiver frequently has no direct knowledge of how these experiences come about, perceptions are often considered as ‘facts’ shared by everyone in the same way due to the same exposure to an external, ‘real’ world. The equation of perception with this ‘reality’ has often been referred to as ‘naïve realism’ (Wade and Swanston, 2013, 78). In neuroscience perception is commonly treated as the product of an intricately intertwined, multilevel visual processing:

• the low-level visual processing, which is in charge of the detection of various types of contrasts in images;

• the intermediate-level visual processing, which is responsible for the identification of visual primitives such as contours, fields of motion and the representation of surfaces; and;

• the high-level visual processing, which integrates information from a variety of sources, leading to conscious visual experience (cf. Hudspeth et al., 2013, chapters 25–28).

Few researchers, however, have ventured to analyse perception from a multilevel integrative viewpoint, which is required to also grasp the dynamic and active quality of perception. Joaquin Fuster offers an intriguing link between perception and action by introducing his influential concept of the perception–action cycle. He claims that the hierarchy of perceptual knowledge is paralleled by the hierarchy of action knowledge:

[…] I alluded to long connections from posterior cortical areas to areas of the frontal lobe. These connections constitute the functional linkage between the two cortical hierarchies, one for perception in posterior cortex and the other for action in frontal cortex. The lowest stages of both hierarchies are the cortical processing areas at the interface between the cortex and the environment: sensory cortex at the input interface and motor cortex at the output interface. In the course of behaviour, the two hierarchies are engaged in a cybernetic cycle of dynamic interactions with the environment that I have termed the perception-action cycle. (Fuster, 2003, 74; emphasis in the original)

People’s understanding of their environment is, in fact, highly subjective and forged not simply by the selectively acquired properties of the visual information by the perceivers’ eyes but heavily constructed by a host of prior and past experiences of the individual. Already at the beginning of the 20th century James Jerome Gibson (1904–1979) identified a fundamental role for vision: vision’s support for action (James Jerome Gibson, 1950, 1966, 1979). The idea that ‘perception is for action’ is fundamental to an enactive approach that understands cognition as a form of practice itself (cf. Stewart, Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo, 2010). An enactive approach overturns the main, classical assumptions of the representational theory of mind (RTM) (cf. Fodor, 1979; Newell and Simon, 1972). One of the central ideas of RTM is that the purpose of cognitive processing is the formation of mental representations. This premise is replaced by the assumption of enaction, that the purpose of cognitive processing really is the guidance of action (Engel, 2010, 221). It has therefore been suggested to abandon the concept of ‘representation’ and substitute it with the more enactive term ‘directive’, in order to adequately characterise the functioning of dynamic neural patterns of interactions in a cognitive system:

[…] neural patterns do not carry ‘images’ of the external world. What these patterns support are not abstract structural descriptions of objects and scenes but, rather, kinds of know-how about sets of possible actions that produces viable segmentations of the scene. Neural activity patterns, on this account, support the organism’s capacity of structuring situational contexts; they ‘prescribe’ possible actions, rather than ‘describing’ states of the outside world. (Engel, 2010, 228–229)

ICC® focuses on the dynamic interaction that unravels cognition as the ‘continuous coevolution of acting, perceiving, imagining, feeling, and thinking’ (Thompson, 2007, 43). Such a comprehensive framework requires more action-based approaches, which do not view action and cognition as separate domains and argue that pragmatic skills (or the ‘mastery of sensorimotor contingencies’) are integral components of higher cognitive abilities, essential for their development (see also Pezzulo, 2015). Therefore, cognition is considered as ‘enactive’, which denotes a skilful activity that necessitates ongoing interactions with the environments. The theory of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) (O’Regan and Noë, 2001) is foundational to many enactive approaches; some researchers have considered enactive ideas useful, but confined to the understanding of sensorimotor engagements. SMC theory highlights the intimate link between perception and action systems, claiming that the cognitive processing of a living organism does not originate from a stimulus but rather from an action (usually an intention): ‘By acting, a child causes regularities in sensorimotor patterns, which are then successively experienced. This permits a child to master the regularities in perception-action patterns, or SMCs’ (Pezzulo et al., 2015, 50). Therefore, action plays a constitutive role for perception in SMC theory: ‘seeing’ is not to be understood as simply the processing of an ‘internal visual representation’ (as suggested by classic cognitive theorists) but corresponds to being engaged in a visual exploratory activity that is again mediated by knowledge of SMCs. Hence, perceptual experience is not simply considered a state of brain, but a skilful activity that is partially constituted by the perceiver’s implicit, practical knowledge of the way sensory stimulation alters with movement. This shift away from considering cognition isolated from action and perception, and away from a representation-centred framework established on database-serving planning, turns out to be more than promising regarding real-world settings. To sum up, SMC theory holds that the quality of perception is constituted by mastery of SMCs, that is, the statistical relation of sensory changes and an individual’s own actions (O’Regan and Noë, 2001). In other words, SMCs can be considered as regularities, which govern how sensory stimulation depends on the activity of the perceiver.

Another important link tying perception and action comes from expert research: expertise substantially relies on perception (cf. Gobet, 2016). It is perception that allows experts to rapidly categorise a problem and therefore ‘see’ more or different cues than a novice. A considerable amount of research has been carried out in various disciplines and applied fields, starting in the mid-1960s with Adriaan de Groot’s research on chess players (De Groot, 1965). When analysing chess players, de Groot found very early on that the world champion had a better understanding of the position after 5 seconds than a strong amateur had after 15 minutes (cf. Gobet, 2016, 12). Based on the assumption that the first few seconds of seeing must hence be critical for its understanding, de Groot figured that perception has to play a key role when it comes to developing skills. It was also shown that, rather than seeing individual pieces, experts see large complexes, in which perceptual and dynamic possibilities are interwoven (De Groot, Gobet and Jongman, 1996). What seems to be the case here is that instead of seeing static constellations of pieces, experts notice dynamic possibilities more often.

With the advent of eyetracking technology, recording eye movements to document skill differences in perception not only in chess but also in medicine, sports, the arts and so forth became popular (for overviews see Duchowski, 2007; Holmqvist et al., 2011; Liversedge, Gilchrist and Everling, 2011; Reingold and Sheridan, 2011; Wade and Tatler, 2005). A number of studies, particularly in the field of medical expertise, have been concerned with the pattern of eye movements, which point to more ‘efficient’ scan paths (fewer fixations and fewer but longer saccades) in experts as well as to the use of peripheral vision guiding their search (Kocak, Ober, Berme and Melvin, 2005; Krupinski et al., 2006). In sports, for example, Helsen and Starkes (1999) found skill differences with detection tasks related to football: experts make fewer fixations before making a decision and fixate the important aspects of the display quicker. Both, football and chess experts hence focus on more important areas of interest (AoIs) than novices and are more selective in where they look. The study of expert perception has also given rise to the field of perceptual learning (cf. Goldstone, 1998; Lu et al., 2011; Sasaki, Nanez and Watanabe, 2010).

Studies of how perception changes as a function of experience and how such changes help the organism to adapt to various environments through learning and acquisition of knowledge as well as of other systems, have been prominent. Various relevant phenomena surrounding visual perceptual learning (VPL) and perceptual experience have been uncovered over the last years (for a detailed overview see Gauthier, Tarr and Bub, 2010; Goldstone, 1998), as, for example, that perceptual learning involves long-lasting changes to the perceptual system of an organism. This improves the organism’s ability to respond to its very specific environment and is also caused by this environment (Goldstone, 1998, 586). Especially when it comes to human and visual expertise development, eye movement paradigms have played a significant role in supplementing more traditional measures of performance, such as reaction time, accuracy and verbal reports (for an overview see Reingold and Sheridan, 2011). In the following experimental pilot we draw on this knowledge and translate it for the socio-cultural realm.