Sociological Explanation of Relationship between Cultural Intelligence and Social Tolerance among Yasouj Citizens

Introduction Many changes in the world such as development of technology, facility in transportation, general availability of media, and tourism industry have led to more interaction between groups and cultures across the world than that in the last centuries. This encounter might range from cultural conflicts to complete cultural adoption. One of the most important factors to avoid conflicts and struggles among people is raising their awareness and perception about cultural variety and differences which might lead to people’s growing tolerance in interaction with new people and cultures. This human ability that can be construed as an index of adaptation with new environments is called cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is basically characterized as the ability to perceive cultural similarities and differences and not ignoring them. Moreover it can be defined as personal capacity to effectively interact with people of other cultures. It is assumes that one of the most positive consequences of developing cultural intelligence is the reduction of prejudices, fundamentalism, assassination, insecurity, and struggles. According to Early and Ang (2006), cultural intelligence has four dimensions of metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. Vogt (1997) also maintains that tolerance has three dimensions: political, ethical and social tolerance. Further, political tolerance, in his view, involves respect for others' civil liberties, and ethical tolerance is to respect what others do in private. However, social tolerance means tolerating the acquired and assigned attributes of individuals. Growing emigration of people of diverse cultures to Yasuoj city on the one hand and the rise of social problems in this city over the past years raises concerns and the question of whether or not there is any significant relationships between cultural intelligence and social tolerance among citizens in this city. This question motivated the current research. Material & Methods Early and Ang’s (2003) standard cultural intelligence questionnaire was used along with a questionnaire developed by the researchers in the current survey. Cronbach’s Alpha, face validity and construct validity were assessed for the the questionnaires. Data analysis in the current study is a micro scale involving individuals as the unit of analysis. Descriptive statistics including charts and tables of frequencies and percentages and inferential statistics involving structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. A sample of 400 people (53% male and 47% female) were selected through stage sampling from among all citizens older than 15 living in Yasouj. Discussion of Results & Conclusions The mean of cultural intelligence was 56.7 while the mean of scale was 60. One-sample t-test indicated that mean of cultural intelligence in statistical population is lower than the scale’s mean with 0.000 significant level and the mean of social tolerance was 109.3 in range of 54 to 171. For inferential analysis and test of hypotheses, we have used structural equation modeling (SEM). According to this technique, at first, a measurement model of any latent factor has been computed at the best fit indexes and then the relation of variables or latent factors has been estimated. The study highlights the importance of cultural intelligence in enhancing social tolerance. All cultural intelligence dimensions had a significant impact on social tolerance (metacognitive: B= 0.15, p= 0.04; motivational: B= 0.35, p= 0.000; behavioral: B=0.20, p= 0.009) except the cognitive dimension (B= 0.04, p= 0.487). The results also revealed that cultural intelligence could not significantly impact on social tolerance (B= 0.34, p > 0.05). In total, around 12 percent social tolerance variance could be accounted for by cultural intelligence. Further, the results suggested that gender moderated the relationship between cultural intelligence and social tolerance. Regression coefficients for the male and female respondents were 0.21 and 0.34, respectively