Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Collective or Individual Culture?

It is almost a common sense view that people living in the United States are much more individualist than those in Japan, but this view may be deeply flawed.

In a recent article in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Drs. Yohtaro Takano and Eiko Osaka contend that there is no solid evidence to support this “common view”, urging future researchers to change their basic paradigms when trying to understand cultural differences.

Initially, Drs. Takano and Osaka contend that the “common view” assumes that cultural effects determine the psychology of the individual. Most notions of individualism vs. collectivism are estimated at the national/cultural level, finding the average of individual responses. This inevitably simplifies the measures and creates a one dimensional spectrum of individualist to collectivist.

This approach is flawed by then assuming that individuals operate based on these norms, and Dr. Takano demonstrates this by breaking down data in previous studies and finding that, if individuals are the basic units of analysis and not countries, research supporting the “common view” falls apart.

While they do not challenge the idea that some cultures tend to be collectivist, they argue that Japan is a poor exemplar of collectivist culture. It isn’t even really on either end of the one-dimensional spectrum! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States is listed as one the most individualistic, but Japan does not lean strongly either way.

Moreover, the authors continue to challenge the idea that such notions can even be simplified into one dimensional measures. The individual psyche is incredibly complex, as are cultural norms, so the dichotomy does not hold under academic scrutiny. For instance, the “common view” has often held that individualism and social interdependence are contradictory, but this is often not the case, with individualist cultures still involving significant social interdependence.

Instead, Drs. Takano and Osaka suggest that individuals differ within a broader culture based on the specific ecological context in which they live. In fact, if individuals move between contexts, they will often change their behaviors. There is no reason why these contexts should be based on national boundaries, as the reality is much more complex.

This can all be important at the empirical level, as they argue, because assuming a “common view” runs the risk of confirmation bias. We may assume that a Japanese subculture is collectivist and thus find significant evidence that it is. This is not only bad research but ends up wrongfully stereotyping individuals based on preconceptions about their culture.

Certainly, the implications for reading people across cultures are clear. Many of the common sense views of how different cultures see the world are invalid and contribute to stereotyping which can be both harmful and unscientific.

This underscores the need to contextualize how interactions to both the individual and their culture. Rather than relying on “common sense,” we can instead rely on Humintell’s judgment and expertise in communicating with those from other cultures.

Culture and Body Posture

While research into cross-cultural non-verbal communication often focuses on facial expressions, body posture is also an important consideration. This may seem intuitive, as we all have experienced the role that body posture has in communicating emotions, but it has been neglected in most research, at the expense of its valuable potential for effectively reading people.

However, in a pair of studies, Dr. David Matsumoto sought to examine how body posture serves as a different non-verbal cue for people from American or Japanese cultures. While both of these studies date back to the 1980s, the evergreen and often neglected nature of this research merits consideration.

The first of these papers, coauthored with Dr. Tsutomu Kudoh, sought to test conventional wisdom about the role of posture in social situations against the possibility that these were limited only to Western culture. Past research had emphasized the immediacy of a reaction and the level of relaxation shown as the main predictors for how those postures would be understood.

In order to test these theories, Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh recruited a large sample of Japanese subjects and asked them to develop a list of postures that they had encountered in real life. This resulted in a list of 40 postures which were then rated based on 16 criteria that included confident, respectful, friendly, or calm.

The participants were then instructed to imagine individuals they knew showcasing each of these postures and to rank them based on the aforementioned criteria. This allowed the researchers to assess the role that particular hierarchical roles may have in shaping these evaluations.

In fact, they found that their Japanese participants did evaluate posture in a significantly different way than Western-centric research had found. While Westerners emphasized like or dislike cues, these participants relied on cues rooted in status and power.

In another study with Dr. Kudoh, the researchers further examined the role of cultural norms in interpreting the emotions behind different postures. Given the conclusions of the previous paper, they emphasized that while the United States fosters an individualist culture, Japanese society is more characterized by status.

This paper gathered both American and Japanese students and asked each of these participants to rate the same postures with the same rubric from the last study. Interestingly, none of these postures were unknown to Americans, even though the list was developed by individuals from Japan.

Again, they found that the role of status differed dramatically between cultural groups, as Drs. Matsumoto and Kudoh found that considerations of status impacted social judgments of internal states and interpersonal interactions. They also found considerable variance between evaluations of different attitudes, such as pleasure and dominance.

Not only do these results help expand our understanding of cross-cultural behavior, but they also serve as a caution to avoid expectations that members of other cultures behave in the same way as do members of our own. This has crucial ramifications in attempting to read people, as we explicate in our cross-cultural communication workshops!

Cultural Gestures and Verbal Cues

Many gestures may be universal, but are associated verbal cues translatable?

Last week’s Olympics blog discussed the universal gesture of triumph and touched on Humintell’s research into the universal nature of many gestures. However, just knowing that many gestures are universal is not enough to effectively read people. Instead, it is important to connect them to verbal messages.

This is exactly what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyi Sung Hwang attempted to do in a 2013 study. This research catalogued various gestures, including both culturally similar ones as well as gestures that vary drastically between cultures.

They asked participants from all over the world to list out gestures based on a comprehensive list of possible verbal messages. These gestures were then shown to participants from the same region in order to maintain validity in the experiment. This process allowed Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang to determine which gestures were recognizable as the verbal cue in question.

Interestingly, they found that universal and varying gestures tended to convey categorically different emotions. While many culturally-specific gestures had complex associated messages, universal gestures tended to convey pretty elemental or basic emotions.

Still, they did notice differences. Some verbal messages, such as an insulting one, occurred in every culture but with different associated gestures. Other gestures occurred universally but with different meanings, including the “A-Ok” symbol in Western cultures which conveyed a variety of meanings, including a reference to “money.”

Finally, there were some gestures which were culturally specific and who’s verbal message existed nowhere else. For instance, the gesture for “apology” only occurred in South Asia, and the signal for “hunger” was not present outside of East Asia. No other regions used these gestures or used gestures to convey these concepts.

This sort of research is critically important for those of us who want to better read people. Many gestures convey verbal messages, clarify speech, or amplify certain meanings, all of which add nuance to complex social interactions.

If we simply exclude gestures from communication, we miss a whole sphere of human interaction. Moreover, when trying to interact across cultures, especially if we do not speak a common language, a focus on universal gestures can go a long way towards bridging otherwise intractable differences.

The trick, of course, is knowing which gestures mean the same thing in different cultures. While this blog tries to help you build this knowledge, it can only do so much. Instead, we encourage you to take advantage of Humintell’s specialized cross-cultural training programs to make you a better people reader, regardless of where in the world you happen to be.