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Embracing Nuances Across Cultures

It is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone from a given culture thinks similarly. Psychologists have been doing it for years!

Last month, we blogged about Drs. Takano and Osaka’s research challenging the “common sense” idea that Japanese are invariably and typically collectivist in their thinking, while Americans are individualists. But if this common view has been refuted, what is supposed to take its place? Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto has a few suggestions, elaborating on the problems with that view and offering an exciting path forward for cross-cultural communication.

To review, the common view of Japanese collectivism and American individualism refers to the alleged existence of culture-wide traits ascribing collectivism or individualism to all cultural members. However, these rely on national averages, aggregating people from diverse regions and incomes, including both the rural poor and affluent urbanites.

As Matsumoto points out, this sort of ecological inference has been challenged for years, but Takano and Osaka’s work acts as a final blow to the validity of this “common sense” approach. Instead, it is necessary to focus on the individual and their differences from others, not simply assuming their perspective based on the aggregated culture they live in.

Such stereotyping should be deeply troubling, especially among psychologists. For Matsumoto, “psychology is the very discipline that should celebrate the uniqueness of each individual in each culture.” Not only is this common view methodologically flawed, but it is also deeply problematic ethically.

The traditional reliance of this view does a disservice to our ability to rigorously study cultural norms. American culture may be individualistic on the whole, but many individuals can be seen as deviating from that norm. Still, determining cultural level effects cannot be done by aggregating individuals but instead ought to rely on appropriately group-level data, such as by studying mass media or institutional practices.

Dr. Matsumoto envisions an approach where researchers focus on individual-level effects as a separate but related phenomena as group-level effects. Not only does this help resolve the problems of the common view but, by disentangling the two, psychology can delve into a new wealth of questions about the relation between individual and group level psychologies in different cultures.

This is not just an abstract moral or methodological point, as these cultural stereotypes are widespread in everyday parlance. Dr. Matsumoto points out that “American individualism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among U.S. Americans to explain and justify behavior. Likewise, Japanese collectivism is an ideological concept that is used in everyday language and discourse among Japanese to explain and justify behavior.”

Thus, it seems necessary for researchers and laypeople alike to challenge this approach. Not only can this help us better pursue research, but it can also help you better understand and communicate with people from other cultures, including Japan. A great place to start is to see more of what Dr. Matsumoto has to say on developing great cross-cultural communication skills.

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.

Framing a Reciprocal Interview

What is the impact of offering an interviewee a bottle of water?

This seemingly innocuous question actually delves into major questions both with regard to communication but interviewing techniques more specifically. By looking at this basic question in a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang were attempting to look at the notion of reciprocity and whether more reciprocal interviewing tactics contribute to boosting rapport and information gathering.

The subject of reciprocity essentially looks at the idea that people want to return or reciprocate favors offered to them. So, if an interviewee is offered the simple kindness of bottled water, they would be more likely to feel obliged to provide additional information during the course of the interview.

Reciprocity is just one form of what is known as “social influence.” The theoretical literature identifies six principles of social influence that hold across cultures, but this study focuses on reciprocity which had been identified as one of the more powerful and pervasive aspects of social influence.

The study in question divided experimental groups around this simple treatment, offering water to half the participants. They hypothesized that this would boost rapport between interviewer and interviewee and would result in more relevant and plausible information.

These experimental groups were also divided internally between those who were asked to lie and those asked to tell the truth about whether they had stolen a $200 check. The experiment was set up to incentivize participants to lie to their best ability, as they were told that being suspected of deception would result in an extra-long questionnaire after the interview.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang found general support for their hypotheses. Liars tended to give more relevant and plausible details after being offered water. Interestingly, neither ethnicity nor culture had an impact. Rapport was also boosted by the reciprocal treatment.

This has significant ramifications for both interviewing tactics and efforts to boost rapport in social situations. When rapport was high, the interrogation proved more fruitful, and reciprocity helped accomplish that! This means that when interviewing an individual, efforts intended to elicit reciprocity may be helpful, even though an actual interview situation is generally a bit higher stakes.

But what does this mean for those of us who are just trying to get better at reading people? Sure, we can offer people we meet bottles of water, but that might be socially out of place! However, the basic principle of reciprocity will hold.

By offering something, be it a compliment, personal information about ourselves, or a gift, we can help create a sense of reciprocity, boosting rapport and better enabling us to know about other people. This is not just some manipulative tactic but also a way of developing better interactions and getting to know people!