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)

When I first read this I was taken aback: How could one of the most famous exponents of intercultural communication take such a pessimistic view of humanity? As I read on, however, I came to see that Bennett was hardly a pessimist. The essay became famous for what it contributed to the field: an inspiring vision of how human beings can move beyond our lizard brains and embrace human difference by endeavoring to see the world as others see it — not necessarily to choose “their” way as better, but to see other possibilities as legitimate alternatives to our own views. The opening words of the essay were meant merely to set the ground: to describe, starkly, a key aspect of the natural state of human affairs, so that we can know the magnitude of what our inner poet is dealing with in its efforts to create openness and understanding through the noise and tenacity of its lizard counterpart.

And it is a lot to deal with. I am speaking here less as a social scientist than as a human being whose lizard brain is always at the ready, in many areas of my life, but most pertinently in experiences with China, even today, over 20 years after my first visit.

A classic example is my completely predictable reaction to getting bumped into by another person. As an American, I am accustomed to a certain spatial cushion, and when people violate the cushion, they say “excuse me.” If they don’t, it’s rude, and I’m culturally licensed to get angry. China, though, crowded as it is, doesn’t allow for much of a cushion. People bump into each other a lot, and they rarely say “excuse me.” They take it in stride.

When I get bumped, though, every single time, without fail, the indignation follows instantly. I can’t control it. Over the years I have gained some mastery over how I respond outwardly, and how quickly I regain my calm, and the meaning I make out of the incident. But the reaction itself can’t be helped.

When people refer to “culture” this isn’t usually what they are talking about. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who is sometimes credited with founding the field of intercultural communication,  distinguished between “Culture” with a capital C and lower-case “culture.” Capital-C Culture refers to “the arts”: what we mean when we speak of a city’s “cultural” offerings, or say that a person is “cultured.” Lower-case culture is what we mean when we talk about psychological and behavioral patterns shared by a group of people. I am talking here about lower-case culture.

Even within this sub-category, most scholars who study culture aren’t referring to the kind of moment-to-moment piecing together of reality that I am describing here. To oversimplify: anthropologists often focus on complex rituals, or kinship relations; linguists talk about “scripts” and “frames”: highly schematic templates for human behavior and thought; sociologists amalgamate statistical regularities. Only psychologists, really, have taken seriously the notion of culture as moment-to-moment reality.

Yet even most psychologists over the years have treated culture as a sort of cognitive add-on, or as a kind of window-dressing: there is an objective world which humans all perceive the same way. Perceptions function as an “input” into some kind of cognitive processing mechanism that includes cultural influences, and the resulting judgments and actions are therefore cultural in nature.

In a recent post I gave a quick overview of a refutation of this notion by one psychologist, David Eagleman. Perception is not a “filtering” of any sort of “objective reality.” Eagelman’s point is not put in a cross-cultural context, but other psychologists working in the field of cross-cultural psychology have similarly questioned the old orthodoxy, and have found evidence that even the way we perceive the world is at least partly a function of culture. I reviewed an astonishing finding in this post.

What’s the point? We have work to do. Parts of our brain are constantly doing battle with other parts in an effort to control our actions (another brilliant insight of Eagleman’s). Some of those parts of our brain, if their orders are followed, lead us down a violent path toward a world few of us would want. Other parts, if listened to, promise a world in which we can be our best selves. Those are the stakes, and if we truly want to create a more peaceful world for ourselves and for our children and theirs, we’d best know what we’re dealing with.

In an earlier post I reviewed some shocking findings from the rod-and-frame test, showing that Chinese and Americans actually see the world differently. As I make my way through Eagleman’s book, those findings seem less and less shocking. Despite our intuitions to the contrary, there is not a fixed, perceivable “reality” that is “out there” for us to perceive. What we perceive as “reality” is completely constructed by our brains from the outset. Eagleman writes that “You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.” (Ch. 2)

Eagleman introduces a distinction first made in 1909 by Baltic German biologist by the (excellent) name of Jakob von Uexküll, between umwelt and umgebung. The umwelt is the part of the environment any given organism can perceive; the sum total of what is perceivable (if there is such a thing) is the umgebung (Ch. 4).

What first crossed my mind upon learning of this distinction was the contrast, also discussed elsewhere in this blog, between low-context and high-context cultures. The subtle cues of high-context cultures, such as Chinese culture, are lost on untrained low-contexters like Americans, because these cues lie outside of Americans’ umwelt. They are not perceptible to us without a great deal of learning over time, and even then are often lost on us — thus the “nervous laugh” indicating discomfort gets mistaken for a regular old, mirth-induced laugh; a promise to “look into it” — clearly a “no” to a native — is misinterpreted as an actual promise to do further research; and so on.

Just scratching the surface here. There’s sure to be more on this book in later posts. Meanwhile go get it on Amazon or iBooks.

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.”