It's Not Just About Language

Ask most people why one country felt harder to adjust to than another, and the answer usually centers on language. But researchers studying expatriate adjustment have found that the deeper friction often comes from something less visible: differences in the underlying values and social norms a culture runs on, a concept researchers call cultural distance.

A Framework Built From Decades of Research

The most widely used model for measuring this comes from Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, who identified six dimensions along which national cultures consistently differ: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, a dimension historically framed around masculinity and femininity in social roles, uncertainty avoidance, long-term versus short-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint.

Power distance measures the extent to which less powerful members of a society expect and accept unequal distribution of power -- essentially, how much hierarchy feels normal versus uncomfortable. Individualism versus collectivism captures whether a society's ties between individuals are loose, with people expected to look after themselves and immediate family, or whether people are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups. Uncertainty avoidance measures how threatened members of a culture feel by ambiguous or unknown situations -- a dimension with direct, practical relevance for anyone navigating an unfamiliar bureaucracy or workplace culture abroad.

Why This Actually Predicts Adjustment Difficulty

Research on expatriate cultural adjustment has found that these dimensions genuinely correlate with how difficult a transition feels. People from low power-distance cultures, for instance, often struggle when moving to high power-distance environments, where subordinates expect to be told rather than asked, and formal hierarchy carries weight informal cultures don't assign it. In countries with weak uncertainty avoidance, differing ideas and approaches are broadly tolerable; in strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures, difference itself can be treated as something to manage or avoid, which can make an expat's unfamiliar habits feel more conspicuous than intended.

Notably, at least one empirical study found that an individual's own cultural orientation -- not just the objective gap between home and host country cultures -- had a stronger effect on adjustment difficulty than national-level differences alone. In other words, two people moving to the same country can have genuinely different adjustment experiences based on how closely their personal values already align with the destination culture, regardless of where they're from on paper.

Why a "Similar" Country Can Still Feel Hard

This helps explain a pattern many expats notice but struggle to articulate: moving to a country that seems culturally close on the surface -- similar language family, comparable standard of living -- can still produce real friction if the underlying dimensions, like power distance or uncertainty avoidance, diverge sharply. Meanwhile, a destination that looks unfamiliar on paper can sometimes feel more intuitive if those deeper dimensions happen to align more closely with a person's own orientation.

A Necessary Caveat

Frameworks like this describe population-level tendencies, not individuals. Cultural dimensions research explicitly warns against using national averages to predict or stereotype any specific person's behavior -- someone from a high power-distance country is not guaranteed to personally expect rigid hierarchy, and treating the framework as a personality test for individuals misuses it. Its real value lies in explaining broad patterns of friction after the fact, and in setting more realistic expectations before a move, not in making assumptions about any one person before you've met them.

The Practical Takeaway

Understanding cultural distance doesn't make a transition automatically easier, but it does reframe difficulty that might otherwise feel personal or confusing. Struggling to adjust to a country that "should" feel familiar isn't a personal failing -- it's often a sign that some of the less visible dimensions of the culture are further apart than geography or language would suggest.