Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions Toward a Unified Social Framework: Workshop Summary (2011) / Chapter Skim
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5 Nation Building
5 Nation Building
Pages 49-60
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From page 49... ...
As Michael Morris, the panel's moderator, noted in his opening remarks, this requires a somewhat different type of cultural awareness than that which matters most in other types of missions, discussed in the previous panels. "Whereas the cultural differences that we looked at yesterday afternoon had to do with dyadic interactions, discourse processes, and relationship scripts, the focus this morning is on individual-level processes -- cultural differences in patterns of emotional expressions and recognition and cultural differences in the information processing strategies used to solve a problem." The panel's two presenters were Jeffrey 49
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From page 50... ...
You can call it the task and the social–emotional, or the task and the relational, and the way in which people deal with these two different dimensions varies greatly across cultures." Understanding these differences is one key to getting along with people from other cultures, he said, and it is a key that is particularly important for Americans. Research shows that, in countries around the world, the usual pattern among people working together is to pay close attention -- or, in sociocultural terms, to have a "heightened relationship attunement -- to other people and to the task or, in situations when there is no task, just to the people." However, Sanchez-Burks said, there is one outlier, or anomaly, in the pattern that appears consistently in the research, and that is the United States.
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From page 51... ...
was falling on deaf ears for the Anglos in this study." In a second study, conducted among employees of a Fortune 500 oil company [located in the southwestern United States] , Sanchez-Burks tested how people reacted to the presence or absence of nonconscious mimicry in a person with whom they were speaking (Sanchez-Burks et al., 2009)
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From page 52... ...
160 Strength of the Emotional Stroop Effect Mean Response Time (msec) 120 80 40 0 Casual, Nonwork Work Context Context FIGURE 5-2 Attunement to how a message is conveyed via emotional tone of voice.
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From page 53... ...
You get this in the lab, and you get this with senior managers in large organizations." This "American exceptionalism," Sanchez-Burks suggested, probably has its roots in the same Protestant work ethic that the sociologist Max Weber credited for the capitalistic spirit in the United States. A lesser known part of that work ethic, he said, was Calvin's belief that people should not display emotions or relational information while performing their calling.1 "So you have this crazy cocktail in which not only do you feel like you're supposed to work, but you're supposed to be very taskfocused while doing it." And so Americans, unlike most other people in the world, pay little attention to the emotional or relational signals of others while they are at work.
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From page 54... ...
Colonel Hughes commanded a battalion travelling to the Grand Mosque of Ali in the holy city of Najaf, in order to coordinate humanitarian aid distribution with a local cleric. In front of the mosque, the battalion encountered a crowd that Colonel Hughes sensed was on edge and close to turning hostile, and he felt that the wrong move on the part of the soldiers could lead to violence.
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From page 55... ...
"High levels of relational attunement can be used to increase coordination and rapport," Sanchez-Burks said. Indeed, simply paying attention to others' emotional states and cues is enough to have these effects.
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From page 56... ...
Americans, he said, see the world differently than people from many other cultures, particularly Asian cultures, and the differences arise from physical differences in the wiring of the brain. The difference that Kitayama focused on was the attitude, common in the United States and Western Europe, that people are mainly independent entities (Markus and Kitayama, 1991)
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From page 57... ...
If the cultural difference in the tendency to make fundamental attribution errors is a product of the difference conceptions of the self, independent versus interdependent, then there should also be a cultural difference in spontaneous trait inference. People from cultures who see the self as independent will subconsciously interpret actions as a product of a person's fundamental traits, whereas those from cultures who see the self as interdependent will not be so likely to attribute actions to particular character traits.
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From page 58... ...
There was a clear correlation between the two: no matter whether they were European Americans or Asian Americans, the subjects who saw the self as independent were most likely to exhibit spontaneous trait inference, and those who saw the self as interdependent were least likely to make unconscious assumptions about traits. Kitayama suggested that these cultural differences are likely to be wired into the brain by the experience of growing up in a particular culture.
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From page 59... ...
This is easier said than done, however. "What makes the situation very, very hard is the fact that cultural models are not just cognitive, but they are ingrained and embodied and therefore they are extremely highly tacit and implicit." A person can recognize logically that he or she sees the self as an independent entity and is prone to making spontaneous trait inferences, but because these things happen subconsciously, they seem completely normal.
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