Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” In M. Paige (Ed.) Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1993, p. 21)

Bennett’s agenda in saying this isn’t to have us throw in the intercultural towel and give up on getting along. His point is to help us understand the scope and scale of the obstacles we humans confront in the task of getting along, so that we can get better at it — in much the same way as a coach, in order to be effective, has to point to a player’s shortcomings.

The above quote leads off Bennett’s most famous article. The “developmental model” referred to in the title has since become one of the industry standards in intercultural communication. Here we’ll take look at the ethnocentric side of the model.

Bennett argues that, as human beings spend more time in intercultural environments, they trace out a roughly predictable developmental path. He divides the path into six stages, the first three of which are “ethnocentric” and the latter three of which are “ethnorelative.” Here is how the stages are represented:

The ethnocentric side of the diagram is defined as “assuming that the worldview of one’s own culture is central to all reality.” (30) Stage 1, Denial, is the most basic form of ethnocentrism: no other groups even exist that are worthy of attention. In a world as interconnected as our is in the 21st century, it’s hard to maintain this illusion. The only way to do it, really, is through “denial” in the psychological sense: pretending that something doesn’t exist, even when it should be obvious that it does exist. One example is the ways in which expatriate communities isolate themselves from their surroundings, trying to create, for example, a “little America” on the outskirts of Beijing.

Defense/reversal is stage 2. In pure Denial, the non-existence of the “other” means there is no threat. In Defense, there is open acknowledgment of difference, and along with it a sense of threat. We defend ourselves against the threat by insisting that “our way” is better. Denigration is the hallmark of the Defense stage.

Reversal, the mirror image of Defense, occurs when we denigrate our own culture, having become immersed in another culture which we have decided is superior. This happens frequently with Peace Corps volunteers, according to Bennett.

Minimization, stage 3, is further along the developmental path, because not only is cultural difference recognized, but it is no longer denigrated. What unites all humanity is put at the forefront; cultural differences are presumed to be less important that what we all share.

You may ask: Why is this still considered ethnocentric? Bennett points out that a kind of universalism underpins this viewpoint, and that universalism might not be shared by all cultures. Bennett puts it this way: “…in general, people who have experienced cultural oppression are wary of the ‘liberal’ assumption of common humanity. Too often, the assumption has meant ‘be like me.’” (42). In other words, we might think we’re all one big, shiny, happy human family, but beneath the surface are some more sinister, ethnocentric tendencies in ourselves that we are pretending don’t exist, but without which we wouldn’t be claiming that “we’re all the same.” The sentiment that “we’re all the same” sounds much better if “they” are the same as “we,” but not vice versa.

When using Bennett’s ideas in my consulting work, I usually focus on Defense, because I see it as the default state of humanity. Most of us spend enough time exposed to those with obviously different beliefs from us that we can’t be in Denial, and Minimization won’t hold up to scrutiny on most days. So on bad days, or in bad weeks or months, we end up in Defense…a lot.

Have you spent much time around Western expatriates living in developing countries? I’ve been one for a good part of my life, and I can tell you firsthand that I’ve spent a lot of energy complaining about how “they” do things here, and that I’ve heard plenty of the same from other Westerners around me, most of whom I like and respect a lot as human beings. We’re not bad people for wishing “they” were more like “us”; we’re just standard-issue human beings stuck, for however long—hours, days, weeks—in a stunted stage of intercultural development.

Bennett is clear that he doesn’t intend his model to describe the static state of any single human being. Each of us at any given moment can find ourselves in any of the stages. What we want, and what we work for, is a steady, stubborn push toward the right side of the diagram.

I’ll take up ethnorelativism next time.

Much to share. At the moment I’m kicking myself a bit for not having my audio recorder running while out and about.

Year after year one of the running jokes among China-weary expats I’ve known has been about the decibel level everywhere you go in China, or at least urban Han China. TVs in hotel rooms, loudspeakers on buses and subways, music blasting outside beauty salons. A constant assault, and hard to get used to for Westerners. The joke goes that the noise provides comfort of a sort, like a security blanket.

Once, back in 1993, an American friend, living in Beijing, was visiting me in Guangzhou and crashing in my room. In the cluster of high-rises I was living in, one morning the noise started earlier than usual (sappy karaoke music wafting from someone’s window), and I was particularly impatient and spiteful. I dug around my tapes for NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, popped it in, and played the first (title) track, at maximum volume, with the box pointed straight out the window. I immediately felt guilty, and confessed my guilt to my friend. He joked: It’s nothing to them. Like the buzzing of a fly, or maybe even soothing. True or not, by the time the track was finished, the karaoke music had disappeared, and I went back to sleep.

The joke is rooted in cynicism and condescension. Yet even if the spirit isn’t right, I now think that in content the joke is dead on.

The first of my two weeks I spent with the YingHua-in-Beijing Summer Language and Leadership Institute, where, like last year, I was guiding 8-to-15-year-old Americans and Chinese through the bewilderment of being thrown together as roommates. Colette had already been in Beijing for three weeks, co-directing the program, while Mariette, our older daughter, age 8, participated, and Francesca, age 6, was tagging along in a pseudo-mascot role.

We spent the week in Huairou, near Beijing, at the National Mountaineering Training Center (a scene in its own right, and pictured here on the kind of clear day that was sorely lacking while we were there). Over four and a half days the Center’s “coaches” led the kids in a series of team-building exercises. In so many ways the coaches’ treatment of the kids was jarring to me (and, I suspect, to the American kids). There are many reasons for this, but I think first and foremost is the EXTREME DECIBEL LEVEL.

Whether yelling “Line up!” or shouting “Can you do it?” or counting down from 10 to get everyone to listen, the noisy episodes just kept coming. Often they’d come after a period of relative silence, making them all the more startling. There’s a harshness and an edge to the noise, which can’t help but encourage the development of a counter-harshness and counter-edge in the children — a tangible, physical manifestation of the harshness and edge of Chinese society writ large.

The week after Huairou we vacationed as a family in Qingdao — the sunny, breezy coastal city of Tsingtao beer fame. Having emerged into the blinding sunshine from the impressive depths of Underwater World, we ambled about in search of a lunch location. As we passed a stall selling fried seafood, a speaker belted out: “Fried seafood! Fried pork! Shishkabob!” Over and over again. Then, as we rounded a corner, we heard something baffling: next to a lady selling a variety of toys sat a speaker. Out of the speaker, at typical volume, issued what couldn’t have been, even to native speakers, anything more than a watery, humanish voice saying…something, over and over and over. As grating as the fried-food bit might have been, at least it had some modest informational value. But the informational value-add of this was nil. The noise was obviously and undeniably serving no purpose but to simply be noise.

I chuckled and commented to Colette, who also chuckled. In light of what had struck me at YingHua it all suddenly made perfect sense. And I recalled how our daughter Mariette, at age 3, not long after we had moved to Beijing in 2004, and having spent much time out and about on the streets of Beijing with Mom and Dad, would at odd times hold up a toilet paper roll to her mouth and start shouting quasi-verbal inanities at high volume, reminiscent of the sorts of noise I’ve been describing throughout this post.

From the perspective of my own personal growth, what had once been nothing but pure annoyance to me now fit inside of a completely coherent framework: adaptive human behavior. Being annoyed is understandable, but by itself annoyance is ultimately fruitless in our species’ quest for genuine understanding. With the distance from it that I now have it all seems quite obvious, but the bodily fact of culture makes it tough to see beyond our own immediate reactions. More on this next time.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2010/08/03/the-art-of-noise/feed/ 2 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/18/eye-of-the-beholder/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2009/09/18/eye-of-the-beholder/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:30:27 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=853 My favorite cultural research result of all time comes from psychology. The study was conducted by Li-Jun Ji, Kaiping Peng and Richard E. Nisbett (Culture, Control and Perception of Relationships in the Environment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, vol. 78, No. 5, 943-955). For anyone who might have thought that culture is some sort of cognitive “extra” or “window dressing,” I suspect this article might change your mind.

Two groups of subjects — European Americans and Asian Americans, all undergraduates at the University of Michigan — took the “rod and frame” test. The apparatus looks like this:

What subjects see when they peer into it looks roughly like one of these configurations:

One of the uses of the test is to detect “field dependence”: to what extent is perception of the rod’s orientation affected by the orientation of the frame? That is, how able are people to “factor out” the frame and make accurate judgments about the orientation of the rod?

If we take a common metaphorical understanding of how “East” and “West” differ, we might think that “Easterners” would be more field-dependent than “Westerners,” since “context” is said to matter so much more in the East. Relationships matter more than individuals.

At the same time it’s an absurd claim. Vision is vision, right? Let’s not be fooled by the metaphor. There’s no way actual perception could differ culturally.

Except that’s exactly what the researchers found: the European Americans were less field-dependent than the Asian Americans. Not only were their judgments of rod verticality more accurate irrespective of the frame, but they got even more accurate when given control of the rod. The East Asians tended to see “rod and frame” together, and gave less accurate judgments when given control over the rod.

To me this finding is absolutely astonishing. I share it in many of my talks, because it makes the point so profoundly that culture goes to the very root of who we are as human beings: if how I literally see the world is partly a product of my cultural background, then how could any part of my life not be touched by culture?

It also serves as a stark reminder to anyone operating in an unfamiliar culture that we’d best be on guard against assuming our own perceptions are right and others’ are wrong. Chinese and Westerners actually see the world differently. Knowing that brute-force fact can help us immensely if we’re willing to distance ourselves from our own perceptions.

Puts a new spin on “seeing is believing.”