Culture Matters (Part II)
The individualist culture that dominates American culture is a direct result of the market economy that America has been at the forefront of developing over the past 200 years. We may not have created the first stock exchanges, but shortly after its origin in 1792, the New York Stock Exchange emerged as the clear leader in world financial markets.
Buying stock in a company you know little about, from a broker you do not know, is much different than the historical model of trading commodities with your neighbors. It requires a different type and degree of trust. So, while it may seem counterintuitive to how we may believe the market-driven business world operates, those in an individualist culture are very quick to give trust. We have to be or the market economy would not work as it does. Earning someone’s trust in our culture just is not that difficult compared to a collective culture where trust is earned over an extended period, through an ever-evolving web of reciprocity. Individualist cultures trust and then verify. Collective cultures, verify, verify again, and then consider trusting.
From the individualist perspective, we may believe we have earned a new acquaintance’s trust because they are behaving politely or friendly toward us—signs that we interpret as relating to trust. But if they are from somewhere farther east than, say, Germany, it is quite likely they are just being polite, and we’ve not even begun to engender a shred of trust. Yet we will inaccurately perceive we have formed some sort of trust relationship and plow ahead as if we have, based on misinterpreted social cues. As a result, it is quite probable we will fail to reach our goal. Slow down and let trust grow.
When I started my FBI career, working in a Field Office, I could call a local police department and usually within minutes have whatever information I needed from them. And then I started working in South Asia and Africa and anyone who has worked there can quickly appreciate the differences. In Nigeria I called the local police and after a few weeks they agreed to meet with me. Then I spent hours a week sitting in their hot, humid offices talking about life and family. I helped them process evidence. I helped them with crime scenes. I gave them evidence packaging materials and latex gloves. It took weeks and weeks of patience before finally one of the Nigerian bomb techs called me late one evening and offered me a piece of intelligence I desperately needed. Again, at home, I am confident I could have cold-called another law enforcement officer, said “hey buddy, can you help me out with this?” and had the information by the end of the day and without once having mentioned my family.
Switching gears a bit, let’s look at how culture may moderate how we relate information to others. An interesting difference between individual and collective cultures relates to how we lie. In individualist cultures, as psychologist James Pennebaker has explored in his work, when we lie, we often tend to drop first person pronouns from our statements. This may be an attempt to distance our individual selves from the lie or deed about which we are lying, or it may be that it just is cognitively difficult to insert ourselves in a situation that did not happen. Famously the Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who had spent the majority of his formative years in the United States, dropped these pronouns from his texts around the time he and brother Tamerlan were planning their attack.
This dropping of first-person pronouns makes sense, but I could get it quite wrong if I’m talking to someone from a collective culture. From the perspective of a collective culture, when lying it would make more sense to add in first-person pronouns. As my friend Professor Paul Taylor and his colleagues point out in a recent paper, in interdependent societies where the good of the group is more important than that of the individual, you would deemphasize the group when lying and emphasize yourself by increasing the use of first-person singular pronouns. Some cues to deception may be cross-cultural, while others are very much not so and could lead us well astray.
Determining whether someone is lying to you is not an easy task, despite all the people on YouTube who tell us otherwise, and you’ll not get it just based on pronoun use, but paying attention to how someone is talking, and noting changes in how they are relating information, can help you to understand when something in the conversation has changed. If you are discussing a business deal with your South Asian counterpart and most of the conversation has been “we understand your position or we believe that…” and suddenly you note a change to “I understand your position” this should be noted. In a western context this could be seen as increasing trust or interpersonal collaboration, while in a more collective context it could mean the group actually does not agree with your position and the relator is lying to you and uncomfortable bringing the group into that lie. It should be noted and explored.
Finally, and again switching gears, a quick note about Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), my favorite of the hundreds of cognitive biases that often get in the way of accurate thinking and perceiving. Individualist cultures place a high emphasis on personal responsibility. We see our actions as following from our individual, self-construed self, and thus believe we should take ownership over them (diminishing first person pronouns aside). Thus, when we see someone else do something we view as wrong, we attribute that act to some flaw in their character. We attribute the action to something fundamental about them.
Collective cultures will, in a sense, have the opposite bias. A given action will be seen more as the result of situational and contextual factors than as having to do with something inherent in the actor. Imagine the issues that can result if something goes wrong in an interaction or dealing between an individualist group and a collective group. Trust likely will already be a factor if it has not been attended to over an extended period, and now there will also be a distinct difference in opinion relative to the cause of the problem—was it the result of the actions of individuals or was it impacted by the context and the complex interrelationships between individuals—and where should blame be placed?
Put this into a business situation. You are negotiating with a potential client or partner, and you’ve come to a sticking point. Through an individual lens you likely will see this intransigence as a personal flaw on the part of the negotiator…an inherent unwillingness on their part to be reasonable. Dimming the individual lens a bit, some of the situational factors pushing them to that position may come into focus and you could then focus on those instead.
As I mentioned in the first installment of this post, people often are quick to discount cultural differences and are wont to rely on their instincts in intercultural situations. This is not often a good strategy. When we are not clear how someone else is perceiving the situation, and we’re blind to how and why we’re perceiving it as we are, there is no productive way out of the situation. But given adequate insight into the cultural differences, we can moderate our interpretations and reflect, in conversation, an understanding of how the other side seems to be seeing the situation. That will advance us much more quickly to a mutually beneficial outcome.
If ever you want to check out a cool graphic of cognitive biases, check out this link. For further insights into culture, Erin Meyer has done a fantastic job summarizing a lot of work in The Culture Map and I strongly recommend Richard Nisbett’s work. For the more nerdy, you may enjoy reading Markus and Katayama’s early work on Culture and the Self. Michelle Gelfand has done some of the best academic work looking at individual and collective cultures, and a good starting point to look at her work can be found on her website. On a slightly different note, but given all our pronoun discussion, if you want to read a really weird (and brilliant) book, check out Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular.
