Referring back to a quote from Milton Bennett, pillar of the field of intercultural communication: 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 [...]

Picking up on the “God’s eye view” theme from the last post: In her seminal 1946 study of Japanese and American culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.” To oversimplify: shame cultures, like Japan (and China, though China wasn’t her focus), regulate behavior through [...]

In an earlier post I gave a brief summary of Chinese and American responses to this question: If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money? How would you respond to this question? If yours is typical of any of the American responses, then: You probably have some fairly clear ideas about [...]

In the last two posts I’ve summarized similarities and differences between how Chinese and American interviewees responded to scenarios about a surprise arrest and a tax hike. I ended the last post with this: I got exactly what I had expected from the Americans: anger in response to both the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike [...]

On some level I have no right to complain about what I complained about in yesterday’s post. When I first went to China at 23, I was a roiling mess of self-righteous “concern” for China in its failure to be exactly like the U.S. It’s taken almost 20 years of learning for me to nuance [...]

In today’s online Wall Street Journal, this piece appeared. Reading it was an odd experience. The headline goes like this: “Obama, Hu Highlight Cooperation.” The first three paragraphs are right on point, with high-level summaries of the nature of Hu’s and Obama’s conversations. Then, suddenly, the fourth paragraph: Mr. Obama’s statement also pointedly noted the [...]

One way to think of universalism is that it’s just another cultural characteristic; that, just as “specific” is different from “diffuse,” “universalist” is different from “particularist.” That’s all well and good. The problem is that universalism has some mischief hidden inside that can cause serious trouble if we’re not aware of it. Here’s what I [...]

While we’re on the subject of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s seven dimensions (in earlier posts we’ve looked at specific/diffuse and universalism/particularism), let’s have a look at another of these dimensions that’s relevant to topics addressed in the blog: internal versus external “locus of control.” In the authors’ words: Societies which conduct business have developed two major [...]

A few more research findings, to shed light on some other aspects of Chinese and American culture. One question asked of participants: Tom is about to graduate from high school.  He decides he doesn’t want to go to college, despite his parents’ wishes.  Instead, he wants to join a rock band.  What will the family [...]

Today we turn to another great interpreter of China, anthropologist Fei Xiaotong. In his Classic From the Soil (乡土中国 Xiāngtǔ Zhōngguó), first published in Chinese in 1947, he writes of the “differential mode of association” in the Chinese cultural mindset. He contrasts this explicitly with a more Western, universalist mode, and ends up sketching the [...]