Facing the increasingly intensified interactions between cultures, why do people sometimes react to foreign cultural influence in a negative way? Three critical conditions were proposed to account for people???s negative reactions toward intrusion of a foreign element into the sacred space of the local community. These three conditions are (a) perceptions of the foreign element as a symbol of the culture it belongs to; (b) the foreign element is perceived to have intruded into the physical space of the local community; and (c) the local space is widely regarded by the local community with reverence and respect. Experiments 1 to 3 tested this proposed framework in different intercultural contexts: Chinese???s responses to the opening of a new McDonald???s shop at the Great Wall of China (Experiment 1); Americans??? responses to an image of Mao Zedong superimposed on that of the Statue of Liberty (Experiment 2); and Americans??? responses to the construction of a Muslim Mosque near Ground Zero in New York City (Experiment 3). The results from these three experiments supported the proposed model. Two additional experiments (Experiments 4 and 5) explored other bases of resistance to spatial intrusions of a foreign element. Results from these additional experiments showed that when cultural intrusions occur in a foreign country or in a competitive political outgroup, individuals may be motivated by culture preservation values, or by political ideology to resist or welcome these intrusions. I close with a discussion on the implications of the results for managing intercultural relations and future research.
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