As economic borders have come down, what about the cultural barriers? The authors of Getting China and India Right, Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang, stated that any organization looking to make progress in these markets needs to embrace the kind of long-term orientation typical of India and China and rarely found in Western countries:
According to Gupta and Wang: “Most companies will find that their existing knowledge about how to succeed in other markets teaches them little about how to succeed in China and India. If they want to aim for market leadership rather than merely skimming the cream at the top, they will need to engage in considerable learning from scratch.”
With that in mind, you are about to discover a little more about the ways U.S. culture compares with Asian cultures. What you find out will create a baseline for understanding the different perspectives among these cultures and help create deeper, more lasting, and more trusted relationships. After all, in order to know how to relate to other cultures, you first need to know where you are standing.
So, here's a question for you:
Who Are “Americans”?
The term American is very broad and includes the inhabitants of Central, Latin, North, and South America. It doesn't just refer to people who live in the U.S., as the following table illustrates.
Table 1.1
17“North America,” Worldatlas, www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/na.htm (accessed November 21, 2014).
18 “South America,” Worldatlas, www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/sa.htm (accessed January 9, 2015).
19 “Central America,” Worldatlas, www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/camerica.htm (accessed January 9, 2015).
20 Roger A. Kittleson, “History of Latin America,” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 10, 2014, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/331694/history-of-Latin-America (accessed January 9, 2015).
There are numerous Americans in the world who have cultural customs and ways of interacting that are quite different from those found in the U.S. This is why, for this book, we have elected to use a more specific term and refer throughout to U.S. Americans.
Bear this in mind as you turn to the next chapter, in which we explore a little more about how U.S. Americans think.
Chapter 2
Exploring Country Cultures
“The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do – the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like – but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception.”
The Machiguenga, who live in a part of Peru close to the borders of Bolivia and Brazil, enjoy lives many of us would envy. Each family member has the freedom to choose what they work on and when to work. They balance their lives, men as planters and hunters and women as harvesters and cooks, with time for relaxation and fun. Given their relative isolation and self-sufficiency, the tribe has little need for cash.
Most Western scientists who visit this living Eden do so to conduct pharmacological research. UCLA anthropology graduate student Joe Henrich's interest in visiting the Machiguenga, however, was very different.23 Henrich wanted to explore whether human beings were psychologically hardwired to respond universally. In particular, he was interested in knowing whether concepts like fairness and cooperation were basic to all cultures, from Western industrialized societies to more isolated exotic ones like the Machiguenga.
Henrich devised an ultimatum game that is similar to what game-theory buffs and economists call the prisoner's dilemma. The game involved two players, unknown to each other, one of whom would receive the equivalent of several days' wages. The recipient would then decide how much cash to share with the other player, who had the option of accepting or refusing that sum. The dilemma was that if the second player refused the money, the first player forfeited his or her share.
Henrich had great difficulty getting the Machiguenga volunteers to understand the rules, saying: “They just didn't understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role.”
This is not how U.S. Americans typically think when it comes to these kinds of games.
For example, when an online article about Henrich's study appeared in Pacific Standard24 in February 2013, hundreds of comments from U.S. readers largely confirmed what researchers already knew about our culture: We prefer splits to be made 50-50; otherwise, we're inclined to punish the other player, even if it means losing money ourselves. We also tend to view someone's behavior as being indicative of a personality trait or disposition as opposed to a situational response. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error, or FAE.
Some of the comments on Henrich's research included (italics are ours to highlight examples of FAE)
• “(T)his hypothetical tightwad offered you nothing. If he's that greedy and indifferent to the lives of others, how do you think he'll use the money once he gets it?”
• “The other person has proven themselves unusually greedy and selfish. They've also done nothing to deserve having this fortune showered upon them.”
• “I can only speculate on why this other person wouldn't offer a fair share of this fortune that fell into their lap through no merit of their own, and I find self-absorption a more likely explanation than them needing every last dollar in that fortune for completely altruistic reasons.”
Note how these commentators jumped to conclusions and made assumptions about greed, selfishness, and self-absorption based on the sketchiest of information.
Thinking Is Not Universal
The Machiguenga study helps highlight the erroneous assumption that there are universal ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. This bias is played out in organizations day after day, especially as it relates to leadership and management research and advice.
Consider this quote from a New York Times interview with the director of the U.S. – based NeuroLeadership Institute:
“Certainty is a constant drive for the brain…the feeling of uncertainty feels like pain…that turns out to be cognitively exhausting.... The less we can predict the future, the more threatened we feel…so we are driven to create certainty.”25
Did you assume the we in that quote meant we humans? Actually, it more accurately refers only to certain cultures.
Geert Hofstede's studies over a 40-year span resulted in various dimensions of national cultures. These cultural dimensions must be compared within the context of other country scores and not analyzed as a standalone dimension. As mentioned previously, one of Hofstede's dimensions looks at the issue of uncertainty avoidance by measuring the extent to which people across 76 countries and