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Embracing Nuances Across Cultures

It is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone from a given culture thinks similarly. Psychologists have been doing it for years!

Last month, we blogged about Drs. Takano and Osaka’s research challenging the “common sense” idea that Japanese are invariably and typically collectivist in their thinking, while Americans are individualists. But if this common view has been refuted, what is supposed to take its place? Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has a few suggestions, elaborating on the problems with that view and offering an exciting path forward for cross-cultural communication.

To review, the common view of Japanese collectivism and American individualism refers to the alleged existence of culture-wide traits ascribing collectivism or individualism to all cultural members. However, these rely on national averages, aggregating people from diverse regions and incomes, including both the rural poor and affluent urbanites.

As Matsumoto points out, this sort of ecological inference has been challenged for years, but Takano and Osaka’s work acts as a final blow to the validity of this “common sense” approach. Instead, it is necessary to focus on the individual and their differences from others, not simply assuming their perspective based on the aggregated culture they live in.

Such stereotyping should be deeply troubling, especially among psychologists. For Matsumoto, “psychology is the very discipline that should celebrate the uniqueness of each individual in each culture.” Not only is this common view methodologically flawed, but it is also deeply problematic ethically.

The traditional reliance of this view does a disservice to our ability to rigorously study cultural norms. American culture may be individualistic on the whole, but many individuals can be seen as deviating from that norm. Still, determining cultural level effects cannot be done by aggregating individuals but instead ought to rely on appropriately group-level data, such as by studying mass media or institutional practices.

Dr. Matsumoto envisions an approach where researchers focus on individual-level effects as a separate but related phenomena as group-level effects. Not only does this help resolve the problems of the common view but, by disentangling the two, psychology can delve into a new wealth of questions about the relation between individual and group level psychologies in different cultures.

This is not just an abstract moral or methodological point, as these cultural stereotypes are widespread in everyday parlance. Dr. Matsumoto points out that “American individualism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among U.S. Americans to explain and justify behavior. Likewise, Japanese collectivism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among Japanese to explain and justify behavior.”

Thus, it seems necessary for researchers and laypeople alike to challenge this approach. Not only can this help us better pursue research, but it can also help you better understand and communicate with people from other cultures, including Japan. A great place to start is to see more of what Dr. Matsumoto has to say on developing great cross-cultural communication skills.

Silent Political Power?

Many commentators are keen to read into the nonverbal behavior of political leaders, but is that even really possible?

After Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki last week, it’s safe to say that they completely dominated the news cycle. In a presumable effort for a fresh take, the Washington Post interviewed nonverbal behavior experts, concluding that Putin was the “clear winner” of a “battle for nonverbal dominance.”

This leads to two pressing questions: is it really possible to analyze nonverbal behavior in those settings and, if so, did Putin really win?

First of all, nobody can really say there is a “clear winner” to any nonverbal interactions. This is especially true when somebody is just watching their behavior in the news.

Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto dismissed much of such commentary on the Putin-Trump summit, saying “Whenever there’s a big meeting of leaders, you see all the body language ‘experts’ on TV with interpretations. But the reality is little of that is validated by science.”

This is not to say that we can’t pick up on some nonverbal behaviors, but they have to be carefully distinguished from mere “noise.” Moreover, they can only ever be indicators rather than tell-tale signs of emotional states.

The Washington Post interviewed Dr. Carrie Keating of Colgate University who emphasized how the leaders walked, their gestures, and the extent to which they paid attention to the audience in an effort to analyze the social dynamic. Keating stressed that the most important feature was Putin’s ability to talk first and longest, which she claimed established him as the dominant man in the room.

Dr. Matsumoto did agree that experts can look into certain nonverbal behaviors and microexpressions, pointing out such subtleties as fleeting looks of contempt or disgust, as well as Putin clearing his throat in an apparent effort to control the dialogue.

However, Dr. Matsumoto emphasized that “there are real limits” to any sort of deduction about internal mental states. Expressions must be carefully dissected and coded in a scientific fashion, and the context matters: “You can’t compare Trump walking into meeting with Putin or standing at podium, for example, to video of him sitting down with Angela Merkel. They’re different settings and actions,” he explained.

Followers of this blog know that nonverbal behavior can tell us a lot about an interaction, but it is not a simple process. Yes, we can derive a wealth of information from observing Putin and Trump’s body language and expressions, but it is difficult to figure out which ones signal something interesting and what are just noise.

Similarly, we must be cautious about making claims about somebody’s internal state from their non-verbal behavior. An expression or gesture may suggest that they are lying, but it cannot definitely tell it. This is especially true with people we don’t personally know, as comparisons to that person’s emotional “baseline” are critical.

Still, this is not to say that people can’t learn something about politicians’ motivations and emotions by watching them. In a series of posts during the election, Dr. Matsumoto presented numerous approaches for reading between the lines when following the news. Similarly, this handy quiz helps show us how subtly opinions can be passed off as factual statements.

Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones?

In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase a similar “disappointed pose.”

Mr. Gendelman noticed that athlete after athlete reacted with the same pose to a missed goal: a look of shock accompanied by the perplexed raising of both arms to clutch the back of the head. If you’ve been watching the games, I’d imagine you immediately recognized it!

This inspired him to ask psychologists and other professionals about this phenomenon, such as Dr. Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Tracy emphasized that clutching the head indicated shame but also that “the constriction of the body, in the way that the player is moving his arms around his head, almost to make himself smaller. Those are very classical shame display elements.”

She went on to describe the gesture as conveying a message of failure to fellow teammates: “I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.”

Dr. Tracy actually published similar findings with Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto in their 2008 study of blind Olympians. Through this research, they found that athletes exhibited both triumphant and shameful expressions upon victory or defeat. While we have focused on the triumphant poses in other blogs, the universality of shameful expressions across blind and sighted athletes of different cultures suggests a poignant universality to these gestures as well.

Other psychologists situated this gesture deeper in our evolutionary history, which shouldn’t be surprising to followers of this blog. Dr. Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, sees this gesture as rooted in defense of one’s head: “The oldest kind of behavioral intention in that class of behaviors is to protect your head from blows.”

This observation certainly fits with the idea that triumphant and shameful gestures serve as a sort of message to others in the group. This connects to research presented in a past blog that sees universal emotions as rooted in their function as a form of social communication.

Dr. Keltner’s point is further supported by the fact that many fellow athletes, as well as their fans, will mimic the same gesture upon watching the game. There is a strong group component here. Not only is the gesture universal, but it is also something taken up by those who empathize with and share the emotion.

The World Cup serves as a great source of entertainment and as a showcase of athletic prowess, but it also reveals a lot about human psychology. Like the Olympics, the cross-cultural nature of such an international event lets us see what is deeply common about the psychologies of people across cultures.

This is just a start however, as Humintell has focused on how deeply these cultural similarities (and differences) impact our ability to read people and understand their diverse perspectives.