14: Social Systems And Culture
It is common to refer to people as being members of groups that have certain personality characteristics in common. When we speak of nationality (American), region (Southerners), race (Asian), religion (Catholics), profession (Accountants), age (Generation X), or any other group of people, we are typically referring to a culture - common traits or attitudes among a defined group of people.
(EN: Generalizing about groups of people is a touchy subject in contemporary America - if you speak about common attitudes of a race, you are quickly accused of racism, particularly when what you have to say is considered unflattering. While it is irrational to assert that each person who is part of a group perfectly conforms to a stereotype of that group, it is also irrational to utterly dismiss the fact that there are similarities among groups of people. It's likely best to set PC sensitivities aside when approaching the topic of culture.)
The Neuro-Basis Of Culture
Culture has been acknowledge long before we had the tools to understand what culture means: as soon as humanity divided into two tribes, the differences were likely noticed between "us" and "them" and as the human race grew in number and became dispersed, the differences among groups of people have become more numerous and more pronounced.
Sociologists and psychologists have noted these differences, and neurologists have also observed distinctions in brain function that make some groups of people similar to one another and different to members of other groups.
One recent finding is the existence of an "empathy circuit" in the human mind. In effect, other people are significant elements of our environment - we recognize them, recognize that they are conscious and emotional creatures like ourselves, and seek to understand, accommodate, and predict their emotions.
To the earlier example of two hikers and the snake - the second hiker jumps when the first sees and reacts to the snake. It is not merely the physical motion of the other person that causes the second actor to respond - but the emotion that this physical action implies. He jumps because he recognizes that his companion is experiencing surprise and fear.
Another example (Frith) is the way we learn from the experience of others: when we see someone touch a hot object - or more aptly, when we recognize the pain they are receiving by their emotional response to the stimulus - this causes us to react as if we had the sensation. Functionally, we can learn from the experience without taking any physical damage.
Neurologically, we can observe activity in the empathy circuit when a person witnesses the emotions of others. We can even observe facial expressions to recognize that a person who sees another person's emotional response reflects it to some degree. We will even cough or yawn when we see another person doing the same, even though we may not be tired or have a dry throat. We sense, and to some degree even feel, their pain or pleasure.
(EN: Especially germane to the present topic, I recall statistical data that indicate that our tendency to mirror the actions of others is more pronounced when the other person is a member of the same group in terms of gender, race, and age.)
While the recognition of empathy by neurology is very recent, the notion of Empathy has long been recognized. The author cites a passage from Darwin's "Express of Emotions" - who recognized in theater how when a character in a play is startled, people in the audience physically move; when there is a dance, audience members shuffle their feet; when an actgor is hoarse, audience members cough or clear their throats.
Why Do We Have An Empathy Circuit In The Brain?
In terms of the value of empathy, the author defers to McGovern, who considers the evolutionary function of the system.
Primarily, it is considered that this circuit enables us to learn from the experience, and particularly, the misfortune of others: we can witness someone experiencing great pain, and even death, and learn from their experience without having to undergo the same ordeal.
Second, it is considered functionally important to make predictions about the motivation of others, deducing what they intend to do, as a method of assessing whether their actions are a danger to ourselves.
Third, it is part of a communal survival mechanism: some animals who exist in communities care for the welfare of others - without some sense of empathy, we would notice only that something is unusual about a person; with empathy, we can recognize that the person is thirsty, and offer them water.
Of course, the actions that result from empathy is not always nurturing: if we recognize that another person means to harm us, or steal from us, we can be proactive in defending ourselves. That is, if members of one tribe witness behavior that leads them to predict another tribe intends to raid their corral, they will attack the other tribe to preempt the theft.
Prejudice
Being South African, the author is attuned to racism, which is a kind of prejudice, about which he makes a handful of observations:
- Prejudice is fundamentally the extension of empathy, predicting the behavior of others. It is regarded negatively in contemporary society, but it is a critical survival skill.
- It is our nature to recognize similarities and differences, and to group and categorize things based on that recognition. This is no less true of people than it is of things.
- It is also a function of empathy to adjust one's own action and reaction in groups. A scientist speaks differently to his colleagues than he does to non-scientists he meets.
- Prejudice begins with typology. We notice differences between two groups - boys and girls - and classify them accordingly. We recognize certain emotions and actions as being specific to one group or another - girls play with dolls, boys with tools.
What level of stereotyping and prejudice is socially acceptable is subject to change, but the level of stereotyping that is socially functional is that stereotypes can serve as a starting point for interacting with other people, but should not dictate our interactions with others, overriding our experience.
The author returns to the notion of conversation between scientists and non-scientists. The scientists will assume, based on his stereotype of a layman, that the person to whom he his speaking does not have much knowledge about the scientist's area of specialization, and will either avoid the topic or speak in simple terms. As he continues to converse with the individual, and discovers the layman has knowledge of the subject, he will adjust his own discourse. This is an example where one party's initial interaction is based on a stereotype, but is then adjusted based on experience.
The "Like Me" Error
A change occurred when businesses considered that making a quality product was less important in winning market share than producing a product that the market wants, regardless of its inherent qualities.
In a way, this has been a positive move: companies no longer need to explain to customers who did not want their product why their brand is better than competitors. Instead, they determine what the customer already wants and built to suit, such that the desirability of the product is not self-evident.
But taken to extremes, it leads manufacturers to produce products based on appeal to the customer when they are buying, rather than the ability to successfully deliver the benefits the consumer is seeking. This results in an increase in new-customer sales, but at the cost of customer loyalty.
Compounding the error is the "like me" attitude. A person who makes product decisions will assume that the customer is like themselves, will have the same values and feelings about a product as they do. A person who creates or approves advertising will assume that the customer is like themselves and will respond positively to a message that they like.
As a researcher, the author finds it extremely irritating that a company will fund research and then completely dismiss what information he gathers by studying customers - asserting that because the customer data doesn't agree with their own opinions, the test must be flawed, or the respondents are "obviously idiots."
Teaching Feelings
Empathy is more effective among people who have a lot in common. Among two people, the more familiar they are with one another, the more accurate their prediction of the other person's feelings and behaviors. While no two people are perfectly in synch, a married couple or a parent and child will learn from their experience of dealing with one another how each will react and respond to stimuli.
It is debatable whether "learning" in the formal sense is involved. A person who experiences a painful shock does not react based on what they know about electricity, but to the physical sensation of pain that they feel. Likewise, a person does not apply logic to their empathy to others - they react to the expression and gestures.
At the same time, conditioning is involved, in a very Pavlovian sense. A person who is shown a red square in conjunction with an image meant to evoke fear will, over time, exhibit a fear response to the red square in the absence of a frightening image. The emotion of fear is associated to something that is by its nature inherently benign.
This is the theory that drives most advertising: the advertiser associates his brand with imagery, words, and other stimuli that are already associated with the emotional response he desires to associate to his product (generally, attraction), such that a person will be conditioned to evoke the emotional response to the brand.
What Is Culture?
For a species to survive, it is generally important that animals do not eat their own kind. In higher orders of socialized animals, this means that survival depends on refraining from doing harm to other members of their group - having sympathy for their own kind.
Culture functions in this way: while all humans are biologically similar, the members of a group learn to identify one another by their habits - they become conditioned to respond positively, or at least not negatively, when they see someone whose dress, posture, and mannerisms are similar to their own, and they recognize these traits through experience.
In terms of prejudice and competition, they have no such imperative to be philanthropic toward those who are not members of their tribe, and are in some instances inclined to be antagonistic toward them.
Inherent to a culture is a set of mannerisms that are considered to be normal to the group - anyone who displays these mannerisms is a member of our tribe and anyone who does not is not member of our tribe - or where we assume them to be a member of our tribe, we regard the behavior, rather than the person, as foreign and unacceptable, and may be inclined to encourage them toward the cultural norm.
Culture is not indelible, as is evidenced by changes in cultures over time, particularly over generations as youth accept or reject the cultural values of their elders. The author uses the US feminist movement as an example that shifted cultural norms significantly over the course of two generations.
Male-female relationships differ among cultures: in contemporary America, they are egalitarian and by choice. In African cultures, where a man's family gives cattle to the bride's family to compensate for the loss of her labor, there is a perception that the husband has purchased the wife and that she is his property. In India, the bride is brought into the family as part of a marriage arranged by the parents, and is treated more as an adopted child - of higher status than the African bride, but lower than the American.
One of the most often cited models for cultural differences is Hofstede, whose classification system is often criticized, but there has as yet been no suitable replacement. Hofstede's system involves five dimensions of cultural difference:
- Power Distance. The extent to which people consider authorities to have power over them
- Individualism. The extent to which individuals consider their own interests as opposed to being servants of the group
- Masculinity. The differentiation of male and female roles, and which qualities are considered more important than others.
- Avoidance. Whether members of a society cope with changes by embracing them or seeking to avoid or suppress change.
- Time. Whether decisions made by individuals are done with the short-term or long-term benefit, and how one is trade for the other.
These cultural classes are similar to personality types - they are general observations that are not universally true within the group.
Also, the notion of a single, uniform culture for a given group of people has given way to the notion of subcultures - groups within a culture that share many traits of the overall culture, but are distinguished from one another by other qualities. The notion of multiculturalism, a group of people who interact with one another but have distinctly different cultures (such as employees of a company) and form.
Hofested observed that cultural similarity among people is a source of synergy, and cultural differences "are a nuisance at best and often a disaster." This further underscores the functional reasons for members of a given culture to associate, and members of different cultures to not be associated to one another.
One of the main criticisms of Hostede's work, or any work on culture, is that groups are too broadly defined. Not all Americans are alike, not all Southerners are alike, not al Georgians are alike. It's likely this is a matter of perception and focus. Taken to its extreme, it would be impossible to define any culture at all, as no two people are entirely alike - so there's some dispute over how similar people must be to one another, and how distinct hey must be from other people, to be considered members of the same culture.
Marketing is limited by financial reasons to dealing with groups of sufficient size to merit investment. There are very few cases in which the profit from serving an individual customer will provide funds for the research necessary to investigate their individual personality. As such, marketing must identify a large enough segment, with a significant enough sales potential, to investigate and plan actions.
(EN: The Internet, and particularly social media, has the potential to change this to some degree, though it's likely the research will be automated, and will still be based on assumptions that an individual will behave as a member of his culture.)
Aside of budget, it is also a matter of the reach of the media: where a given television station reaches audience members in a specific geographic location, the marketer must create advertising to appeal to that area. In a small country such as France, one must advertise to "The French" and cannot reach just the Aquitaine or the Alsace regions and the subcultures that live in those areas.
Culture is not subject to dramatic change over short periods of time, when compared to impulses such as hunger or "mood swings." It tends to affect consumers for a long time. Subculture changes more rapidly than the mainstream culture, but even this takes place over a longer period of time than most emotional states.
(EN: There are significant differences between mainstream culture, a subculture, and merely a passing fashion - as well as professed versus practiced culture - that the author touches upon, but I don't think he gets it quite right. In the context of the topic of emotion, the author's point is accurate, but it oversimplifies and distorts somewhat the concept of culture, and I expect the topic needs more deliberation - but likely in other sources.)
Language
Language is considered to be "the most distinctive part of culture," specifically pertaining to the language that a person speaks every day - though it's less to do with the way in which a person communicates with others as the language of their internal monologue: we do not merely speak in a given language, but we think in a given language, and that language shapes our thoughts.
The author uses the example of colors: a brand study done by a brewing company in South Africa confounded the sponsor, and he discovered the problem was that there are far fewer words for color in Afrikaans (the native language) than in English (a language people there speak, and in which the research was done). While subjects able to recognize terms such as "maroon" and "beige" from English, these terms do not exist in their native tongue and they are not inclined to use them, or even think about them.
Consider the dictionaries of language: an unabridged dictionary of the English language is several inches thick (EN: The OED is a multi-volume set, over 20,000 pages) whereas in other languages, such as Zulu, the lexicon would be less than an inch (or half an inch) thick.
Regarding emotions, specifically, a person who speaks Zulu has far fewer words to define emotional sates than does the English-speaker. This doesn't mean that the Zulu-speaker has fewer emotions but that his language constrains his consideration of emotion to a small number of vague and general terms.
"Advances" in language generally are brought on by technology: a new "thing" appears in the environment and people must learn the name of it, which doesn't exist in their native tongue, and "smaller" languages will adopt the term used by larger ones (chiefly English). Hence, the Zulu will add an "i" prefix to an adopted foreign word (itaxi for "taxi"), the French will assign it a gender (le taxi), the Japanese will roughly transliterate it (takushi) as will the Hindi (taiksi).
(EN: And before English-speakers get too smug about the world following their lead, "taxi" is adopted from Latin, which was adopted from Greek, as are many of the names of technological devices discovered in the 20th century and later. English itself is merely an assemblage of other languages.)
But return to the point: that speaking a language is not the same as thinking in a language: a person may use an English term to communicate to others about something, but they still think about it in their native tongue, and still come to terms (literally) with their experience in their primary language.
Culture And Emotions
In terms of culture and emotions, the author presents some of the conclusions of Oatley and Jenkins (Understanding Emotions, 1996) because he believes "they have got it mostly right."
Emotions are strongly influenced by culture, and in the Western culture they are distrusted in favor of reason, but at the same time considered a basis of authenticity.
However, culture is largely understood only by contrast: where two peoples hold different ideas, the idea is considered to be a part of culture. Where they share an idea, it is not. This limits our understanding of culture itself.
Emotion relates to culture. In the USA, where individualism is a cultural value, any infringement of the "rights" of an individual result in anger and any personal weakness results in disgust - in tribal cultures, where "we" are considered more important than "I", there is no such reaction.
Stemming from the same individualist/collectivist schism, emotions are perceived differently in the West. My emotions are important because I am important - and emotion itself is seen as an individual rather than a collective state. Love, happiness, sadness, and anger result from our interactions with others. Every person perceives the same stimulus, but each individual interprets and responds to it in idiosyncratic ways.
The notion of "emotion," or at least in its practical application, concerns reaction to an external stimuli - but the way in which a person reacts depends more upon the internal state than the external stimulus. A person's personality and culture influence his perception and reaction.
And in that regard, culture is important to understanding emotion and psychology, particularly in Western markets where the individual emotions, moods, personalities, and so on influence buying behavior.
An opposing view, which cannot be entirely dismissed, is that there is a small set of emotions resulting entirely from biology - people in various cultures have the same attraction/revulsion to certain things in a very general sense - and the larger set of emotions we experience that are unique to our culture are more or less based on the smaller set of biological emotions that all people experience.
The Global Brand
The notion of globalization began in the 1980's (the author cites Levitt's 1983 HBR article on the topic) and, while controversial at first, has become an accepted fact in the present day (citing Hollis's book on global brands, published in 2008).
While there are still critics that indicate that cultural differences are such that a brand must be tailored to a specific market, there are brands that have truly succeeded in becoming global: Pampers, MacDonald's, Nokia, Microsoft, Toyota, and Coca-Cola are all recognized in many different cultures.
The notion of globalization, itself, seems to be based on the notion of countries rather than cultures, conveniently ignoring that in a given nation, even in a given town, there may be multiple cultures. A brand that succeeds in America is accepted by many different cultures, and this acceptance can be extended among the (arbitrary) borders of a given nation.
And yet, we cannot accept the alternate extreme, or the notion that any idea is entirely universal: even a simple idea that would seem to be acceptable to "everyone, everywhere" will run afoul of cultures that do not share it, and may espouse an opposite and incompatible point of view.
The notion that the mass media homogenizes culture has not played out, and the opposite is more evident: rather than subjugating the world to a single voice, print, television, and the Internet have fractured - there are many thousands of voices, and users can choose the ones that speak to their current values rather than being assimilated.
Social media is further creating subcultures - people are no longer subsumed into the local culture of the physical environment in which they happen to live, but can connect with like-minded individuals across great distances to engage and interact with others who share their values and beliefs.
Bio-Measures And Culture
The author is not aware of any neuroscience that suggests differences in brain structures based on cultural differences. However, since culture leads us to react in a specific way to certain stimuli, it is reasonable to observe that people who react in the same way to the same stimulus will show similarities in the patterns of activity.
However, this may not prove useful and might even be misleading, as current technology provides an indication only that there is an emotional reaction to a given stimulus - not whether that reaction is positive or negative.