Assessments are made from the lense of your culture

Cultural Insight: Assessments of other cultures are made from one’s own culture as the baseline, but this can lead to contradictory results.

A French person may accuse an American of unfeeling bluntness because the French generally contextualize their speech in subtle nonverbal cues. Before you say, “Well, that’s just the way the French are,” consider that a Chinese person would make the same accusation of the French. ((Meyer, pg. 22))

When I assess another’s culture, I do so from the lense of my own culture. If I’m from a culture that values hierarchical relationships, when I interact with another culture I use my own culture as the baseline from which to compare them. My culture may not actually be strongly hierarchical, but the degree of difference may lead me to conclude that my culture is quite hierarchical. That is until I visit Moscow!

Let’s say my business has a South Korean vendor. This is my first time interacting with South Koreans and I ask my colleagues for advice.

Frederick Kepler from Munich, Germany warns me that South Koreans won’t tell you what they think even if you question them. He thinks they want to sabotage our business by keeping key details from us and concludes that their silence indicates smugness.

Juan Gomez from Bogota, Columbia shares that the South Koreans are fantastic. They offer him detailed feedback and are professional and thoughtful. He says, “I wish people back in Bogota would be as transparent. My people are so concerned about saving face that they never offer criticism.”

As a business person, who do I believe? The advice of my colleagues appears contradictory, and I might wonder if they’re telling me the truth. In fact they are, but their culture’s baseline for communication is on opposite ends of the South Korean’s cultural baseline. Each is looking from the other side of the glass.

Meyer makes a wise observation that simply getting to know individuals is not sufficient to understand their culture because we compare from the perspective of our own culture instead of a distribution across all cultures ((Meyer)). When I step back from my own culture to see where it lands in relation to others, and how they compare to one another in the broad picture, I get a better feel for the degree of difference between my culture and another. Where our cultures are similar I may need to learn some customs but I won’t need to dramatically modify my behavior. When there’s a significant deviation, I may need to stretch myself to accomodate to the culture. If I’ve interacted with another culture with similar leanings it may be less of a stretch since I’ve done it before.

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