Cultural Learnings: A Crash Course in Understanding Foreign Cultures

It’s news to an American when they hear that their country's women “horse laugh” to show their honesty. But that’s exactly what the magazine Mental Floss said in its translation and round-up of online Japanese cultural guides of the United States. Americans also learned that the entire United States has poor security and that they are polite drivers (this is unlikely to find believers in the US). The rest of the article is funny, and it went viral probably because American readers wondered in amusement why these would be the important things to know about visiting the US. 

The Japanese are hardly alone in missing the point in foreign countries. Understanding other cultures is extremely difficult and is usually the result of many years’ experience and effort. The advertising world is full of famous stories of cultural misreading and even simple linguistic slip-ups. 

When a foreigner's cultural literacy is accurate, however, it can sometimes be so incisive that it can help that country understand itself better. In the American literature, there is everything from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to contemporary satire with films like Borat. And Russia has had a thorny relationship with a brutal account of its society called Empire of the Czar written by the 19th century French aristocrat Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, the Marquis de Custine, who was inspired in his style by Tocqueville. 

Without devoting many years of your life to developing a profound understanding of a foreign culture, there are some tricks for getting sensitive to how other countries generate and maintain their habits, morals, and priorities. Here are some tips…

What to do

Get out, talk to people, but don’t necessarily believe what they tell you about their country. 

Rather, listen to the themes they communicate as a better indicator of what their culture is all about. Most people think they understand their own culture very well, but the truth is that very few actually do. One reason for this is that they are simply too close to their culture to be able to see it as something different, to see it in relative terms to other countries. 

Understand that cultural behaviours usually have their own reasons and rationales. 

Text books on international business seem to focus their cultural sections either on whether they are high or low context or on superficial details, but businesspeople are equally guilty of looking at custom and treating it dogmatically, rather than going an extra step to extract the reason for a custom. Some of the time, that won’t be important for business, but in many cases it is. For instance, if you go to Mexico and have a business meeting, prepare to have a late lunch with two shots of tequila before the food arrives. The reason for this is that Mexicans want to get a feeling for what kind of person they are dealing with before they commit themselves to anything, which is crucially important in a country with weak regulatory and enforcement regimes. Similarly, karaoke in some East Asian cultures is viewed by outsiders as just a customary way to have some fun with potential business partners. But it is more important as a way to learn something about your counterparts: are they open or shy, sincere or mechanical, serious or silly?

Read novels — especially the bad ones 

While everybody knows that you should read a country’s classics, I would also argue that in some cases it can be just as valuable to read or watch a country’s mainstream pulp. Classics are wonderful for posing questions and illuminating deep and fundamental themes, but pop culture and mainstream material is especially important for how it can illuminate contemporary priorities and values. I spoke recently with a prominent figure in the US-Brazilian business community and she told me that Brazilian society works out its conundrums and fascinations in its soap operas — more so than in other country she had visited, and certainly more than in the US.

Read the newspapers carefully

Reading newspapers is crucial, of course. But the key here is to be able to digest the news and stand back to say, “What’s really going on here?” Is this country taking an illiberal turn? Is the middle class making their aspirations known? Are they becoming more or less trusting of power? Is there a popular move toward giving more trust to leaders or to fellow citizens? All of these questions are the kinds of things that get answered gradually with lots of convergent pieces of information.

Here are some other things to look for:

• How do people treat authority figures? 

• How does a good or moral person look and behave? What is the lower limit of socially acceptable morality? For instance, is it okay to cheat people you don’t know?

• What is the definition of success? And what does a social failure look like? 

• How do the country’s rural people behave? Most of the time, a country’s urban population simply has a more cosmopolitan sheen on top of a rural mentality. 

• What kind of jobs are popular with a country’s young professionals starting their careers? 

• How do people think about time? When making plans, is there a clear line connecting the present to the future? Is a good future near and attainable? Or is the good future distant and predicated on a high sense of inherent self-worth or national pride? 

• Where do problems come from? Do problems come from outside (the immediate situation, the relationship, the country, etc)? Do problems come from inside? Even if it’s a religious culture, is there a fair amount of emphasis on cause and effect? Or does causality move through a black box on its way to a result? (Tip: when there are gaps in public knowledge about an event — political, social, economic — check to see if the popular media fills in those gaps? These are the projections of suspicions and anxieties that contain a great deal of information.)

Going Deeper: Reading Cultural History

Reading cultural history is a mixed bag, but can yield big dividends. The best authors are controversial and are usually inclined to advance a thesis, but cultures are sometimes too complex or fuzzy or varied to be captured under a thesis. And one would be hard-pressed to find consensus among cultural historians; contrarian positions are rewarded in academia and in publicity campaigns. You could read and compare lots of cultural histories, and then see how well they play out in your experiences with the culture, but that’s a significant investment in time. 

There is a faster way. Historians are often divided into lumpers and splitters. Lumpers look at specific trends over long periods of time. Splitters look at smaller slices in time to make assertions or extract larger insights. Both are useful in cultural examination, but for our purposes, the most generally helpful are the lumpers — especially the lumpers that want to get out of the way and capture the debates that animate a country. For Western civilization, one of the very best for this was Jacques Barzun who wrote From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He assists the reader with analysis and spots major trends, but also points out merits and demerits of other views even if they run contrary to his assessment. Find the Barzun of whichever culture you’re looking into, if there is one.

One paper worth reading closely is “A Cultural Typology of Economic Development" by Argentine sociologist and political scientist Mariano Grondona in the edited volume Culture Matters. He separates cultures into those that are favorable or resistant to development and proceeds to outline twenty contrasting cultural factors that indicate a country’s economic inclinations. This paper is relevant and is sure to encourage incisive thinking far outside just the realm of economic development. I highly recommend it.

What not to do

Don’t be Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman’s first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, was widely regarded as a fair and readable account of the issues confronting the Middle East. It was sensitive to history and the nuances between many of the stakeholders in the region. So it is ironic that a journalist who started his career with such a phenomenal and accessible book would also be the columnist for whom there would later be a satyrical op-ed generator. 

Don’t be Davos Man

Davos Man is a little like Thomas Friedman, but he’s just wrong more often. It’s just a fact of life that businesspeople these days, and particularly high-flying executives, can only spend a short amount of time in a country on any given visit. But it’s an amazing thing to hear so much confidence built on such flimsy evidence and limited perspective. Steven Rattner’s New York Times blog post titled "India is Losing the Race" is pretty easily identifiable as balderdash by those who know better (as comparisons of China and India so frequently are). But that didn’t stop Rattner from scribbling it off.