How are nonnatives evaluated when committing cultural faux pas, and how does their fluency in the language of the foreign culture affect the evaluation of their culturally inappropriate behavior? I address these questions in the context of Russian professionals learning to interview for jobs in the United States, an arena of strong cultural differences where cultural faux pas can occur easily. Building upon previous research on stereotypes and stigma, and upon research on accounts and discounting, I find that language fluency has a contingent effect on the evaluation of culturally inappropriate behavior. When an individual is assessed on interpersonal dimensions, poor language fluency leads to a less negative impression of culturally inappropriate behavior, but this shielding effect is reversed when the dimension of evaluation is professional competence.
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