Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Not dividing the world into weird versus non weird. He is not saying that there are two types of people in the world.
Hello, this is Joseph Scholz, and welcome to the Deep Culture podcast, where we explore culture and the science of mind. And I am here today with Ishita Rai and Emre seven. How are you doing?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Hi, Joseph. Hi, Amre from a hot and humid Durga poor. And if you hear construction or any noise, that's just normal life in the background.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: Hi, Joseph Ayeshita. Hello again from a hot and sunny Sivas, Turkey.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: And it's hot here in Tokyo as well.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: So the title of this episode is beyond weird approaches to intercultural education.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Now, the three of us are all intercultural educators. I teach classes and run an NPO. Some people do training in international business. Ishita, you have a lot of experience.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: With that, and a lot of our listeners work in university education. Emre, you work with study abroad students, you teach intercultural communication.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: So there's no clear definition of just what is and isn't intercultural education. There's no real consensus on how to go about it. There are different theories and models. But today we want to talk about a criticism that we sometimes hear, and.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: That'S that intercultural education is dominated by the theory and methods from a few countries, in particular, so called western countries, Europe, North America.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: It is true, of course, that the field of intercultural communication was first developed in the US and then also in Europe. Many intercultural specialists are from those countries.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: But this does raise some questions. First of all, do approaches to intercultural education developed in, quote unquote, western countries work in other places?
[00:02:18] Speaker A: So, for example, does an intercultural training program designed in Germany for Germans work for Peruvians in Peru?
[00:02:26] Speaker C: This question relates to theorizing, too. Are the concepts used in English, for example, equally useful in other languages?
[00:02:36] Speaker B: And are we missing out on ideas from other places? What can Europeans learn about diversity, for example, from interculturalists in India?
[00:02:49] Speaker A: And when people talk about this issue, they often use the acronym weird. And that stands for western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. I've heard people talk about so called weird approaches to intercultural education or theorizing from weird countries. So in this episode, we'll dig into the question, is intercultural education weird? Is it biased in some way?
[00:03:16] Speaker C: And this topic is too big for one episode. So today we will focus on what it means to be weird and how intercultural education is influenced by its weird origins. Then in another episode, we will talk about what to do about that.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: And that brings us to part one. The story of weird.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: We mentioned that weird is an acronym, but there is an important story behind that acronym.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Joseph Henrik, an anthropologist at Harvard, created the acronym WeIRD. He used it to refer to a demographic category in psychological research.
He was interested in the question, are the subjects of psychology experiments typical of the world population?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: This is how he and his authors started their 2010 article, the weirdest people in the world.
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Researchers often implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations or that these standard subjects are as representative of the species as any other population.
Are these assumptions justified?
[00:05:00] Speaker C: So Hendrik was calling into question the idea that people's minds work similarly around the world. In fact, the subjects of psychology experiments in the United States have often been white american college students, largely because psychology professors can easily get them to take part in their experiments.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: And Hendrik's question was, can we draw conclusions about human psychology from such experiments?
And he shows that, in fact, there is more psychological variation around the world than many people realize.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: As he says in the article, there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations, and weird subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.
[00:06:18] Speaker C: Okay, let's pause for a moment to digest this. He is talking about cultural variation in fundamental aspects of how we experience the world, even things like visual perception. In other words, even the way our eyes see the world is influenced by culture.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: I was struck by the idea of cultural variability in moral reasoning, how we think about right and wrong. That's so personal. And I such an important part of who we are.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Another area that feels highly personal is our self concept. There is cultural difference in the way we experience our identity, our sense of self.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: And the list goes on. Culture shapes our psychology in profound ways. Ways of thinking and feeling and judging and relating that feel totally natural to us are in fact deeply shaped by the society that we grew up in.
But for the most part, we don't notice this.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Which brings us back to this idea of weird countries. The psychological makeup of people from weird countries is an outlier, not typical, and I think this is the first lesson that we can draw from this research into weird psychology. As an intercultural educator, I need to understand that. For me, growing up in the US has shaped my mind in powerful ways.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: And that's true for me. My mind was shaped by growing up.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: In Turkey, as was mine growing up in West Bengal, India.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: But we need to be careful here, because Joseph Henrik is not dividing the world into weird versus non weird. He's not saying that there are two types of people in the world, but.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: People sometimes use the term weird in this way. And sometimes there is political critique, for example, the idea that weird thinking has been imposed on the rest of the world. But that's not what Henrik is saying or implying.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Well, I also hear things like weird thinking is too rational, or weird people are unfeeling.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: And I also feel that people idealize so called non weird thinking, that it's holistic and somehow better.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: But these kind of statements are missing the whole point of Heinrich's work, which is to look at the complexity of cultural variation in psychology.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: And of course, there are different thought traditions, ideas that develop in certain parts of the world. So called western philosophy is traced back to the Greeks. For example, chinese civilization is said to be influenced by the ideas of Confucius.
And if you want to talk about that, maybe it's best to use cultural terms like western, chinese or asian.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: But the term weird relates specifically to differences in psychology. People from weird countries share some psychological characteristics due to similarities in social structures. But to understand that, we really need to dig into the research.
[00:10:07] Speaker C: And this is what Hendrik does in his article, which has turned into one of the most widely cited psychology papers in history.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: And since then, Hendrik has continued his work. He published a book which explains what is unusual about the psychological makeup of people in weird societies and the social conditions that led to those characteristics.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: And we will talk more about that in part three. But for the moment, let's get back to the question of how research into weird psychology relates to intercultural education.
[00:10:47] Speaker C: And that brings us to part two. Is that weird?
[00:11:02] Speaker A: So, Henrik's research identified a blind spot in the field of psychology. But the question we want to ask is, how do these insights shed light on intercultural education?
[00:11:15] Speaker B: I think his work can help us recognize aspects of intercultural education that we might not notice otherwise and that maybe don't travel so well.
So let's brainstorm a bit here. What are the common ideas or approaches that we find in intercultural education?
[00:11:38] Speaker C: Well, you find a lot of key concepts and definitions.
What's the definition of culture? Or what do we mean by intercultural competence?
[00:11:48] Speaker A: And there are lots of theoretical models, such as the developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, the pyramid model of intercultural competence, the v model of acculturation, the u curve hypothesis. And you know, we could go on.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: And on, and there is a lot of cross cultural comparison, like the value dimensions of Geertov Stdin dilemma theory by trompenars and Hampton Turner, or the World value Survey.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: So how does knowing about weird psychology help us?
[00:12:24] Speaker A: You know, the first thing that strikes me is that these concepts or models can get pretty abstract. And one aspect of weird psychology is a tendency towards analytic rather than holistic reasoning and a tendency to categorize and conceptualize.
[00:12:42] Speaker C: It sometimes feels like a horse race between terms. Which is better? Intercultural competence, intercultural sensitivity. Intercultural awareness. Cultural intelligence.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: And this raises a big question. How do abstract definitions like this help people make sense of their intercultural experiences? So how does knowing the right definition of culture help my study abroad student from Sweden, for example, make sense of hierarchy in Japan?
[00:13:14] Speaker B: I think it's safe to say that one limitation of this kind of theorizing is that it is so language dependent.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: That's right. These terms are often in English. It can be hard even to translate them into other languages. In Turkey, for example, you find carbon copy translations. The word competence has 15 different translations in Turkish, such as which means proficiency, kabilieit, which means ability, ustalq means mastery, and depending on which one you pick, a turkish speaker will get a different feeling for what competence means or words. They get no feeling at all.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: I found a dozen translations for competence in Bengali, eight in Hindi, and none of them fit the feeling of competence in English.
[00:14:12] Speaker C: That reminds us that language is not neutral. We have a feel for what things mean in a particular language, which means.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: That if specific concepts and definitions are your starting point in intercultural education, then a lot is going to get lost in translation.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: So what does this mean in practice? Podcast team member Leo Liu was not raised in a so called weird country, but he has worked as an educator and a trainer all over the world.
So we asked him about his experience with intercultural education and weird psychology.
[00:14:56] Speaker D: I grew up in China, a developing country, and made the transition to living and working in the UK.
And yes, I have felt the psychological gap as I adjusted to a so called weird society.
This involved more than speaking a foreign language.
It was a different world with new cultural codes, ways of communicating, of making friends, different working styles.
This was psychologically challenging. It involved deep change and sometimes self doubt, but also personal growth.
Over the years, I have taught in over 30 countries on subjects such as management, environment and climate change.
I have found, for example, that for people from more interdependent societies. Storytelling can be more effective than business models based on logic, full of squares and boxes and arrows and lines going all over the place.
And many cultural models, such as the cultural dimensions of Hofstadt, feel rather weird to me because there is so much emphasis on categorizing, putting culture into a neat set of boxes, like when we classify animals or plants or stone tools.
Understanding psychological variation around the world requires deep adjustment to our ways of navigating in society, as I was required to do in the UK.
For better or worse. However, many privileged interculturalists never experience this.
We all have met with people who are well traveled, but who have simply visited many tourist spots around the world.
In the international humanitarian work I do, there is often a requirement that employees have overseas experience, but this may simply be an office job in another capital city, living in an enclave of expats.
Compare that with the challenges faced by economic migrants or political refugees, who often must navigate a foreign and even hostile society simply to survive.
The whole notion of the global citizen, all world traveler often ignores the experience of people in this situation.
So, yes, I have many thoughts on how intercultural education can expand beyond current approaches, and I look forward to sharing these ideas in future episodes.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: You know, listening to all of this reminds me of just how complex these issues are and why simply dividing the world into weird and non weird is not useful. We need to focus on specific aspects of psychology that may or may not travel well.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Well, one thing that is obvious to me is the majority of people in the world are less individualistic than what is common in weird countries, and that feels like it influences intercultural pedagogy.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: I see this in the ways that educators talk about the goals of intercultural education.
So let's try an experiment. Let's ask our listeners, what is the mental picture, the image in your mind, of the goal of intercultural education?
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Is it of a person who has developed intercultural competencies, a skill set, so to speak, is the sign of their success, their ability to produce positive outcomes?
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Well, that image is very individualistic. Intercultural abilities presented as a way to add economic value to one's personal skillset. It is really a transactional view.
[00:19:33] Speaker C: I also see individualism in how culture is conceptualized as a form of identity that each individual carries within them, something that makes them unique. You hear people say, we all have many cultures.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Well, you know, psychologically speaking, that represents an independent construal of self, the idea that each of us is defined by the unique traits that we carry within us.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Whereas in more collectivist societies, culture is who you are in relation to your community, your society. I am a Bengali. I am so and so's neighbor, colleague, cousin, mother.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: I think there's another sign of individualism in intercultural education.
Many educators seem to feel that individuals can go beyond culture. You hear people say, oh, I'm not just german, I'm a global citizen.
[00:20:33] Speaker C: According to research by the Japan Intercultural Institute, more than 50% of intercultural educators say that they identify more as global citizens than as citizens of a given country.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: And this idea just doesn't make sense to someone who sees himself as an integral part of a larger community, which is the majority of people in the world.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: I think there's another blind spot in intercultural education, and that's a near total lack of discussion of religion and morality. Learning goals are often talked about in very idealistic and secular terms. For example, the idea that, well, in the end, we're all human, or it's a small world after all, or we are the world.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: And in many parts of the world, you cannot talk about cultural difference without talking about religion. Religion shapes people's worldviews. It's the organizing principle for many societies. People connect through religion, and they also set themselves apart with it.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: In Turkey, 95% of people identified themselves as Muslim, and others are non Muslim. Or gaur, that's the word that is often used pejoratively. And being Muslim may be a stronger identifier than being a Turk. For example, the gagawas, a turkic ethnic minority living in Moldova, are mostly orthodox christians, and they may be considered less us than someone who isn't a Turkish but is a Muslim.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: And I see this, too. It can be hard for a Hindu Bengali in India to connect to a Muslim Bengali from Bangladesh. I have heard people say things like, they aren't Bengali, they are Muslim.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: You know, I think that intercultural theory sometimes sanitizes otherness by talking about it largely in terms of foreign countries and for individuals, when the reality is that religious and ethnic differences create very powerful forms of otherness.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: So how can intercultural education help? We need approaches that can address the otherness found in different societies.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: I hear intercultural educators say you need to be, quote unquote, open to other cultures to honor them. But what do you say to someone who feels that non believers must be avoided or struggles with questions of faith because of their experiences with other value systems?
[00:23:40] Speaker A: Well, I think many people in weird societies are not that comfortable talking about religion. It can be taboo even to bring up the subject. It's not easy for me, but that's normal. If you grow up in a secular society like I did, it's hard to navigate issues like religious belief around the world.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: We all bring our particular psychology to the work that we do. There's nothing wrong with being shaped by weird psychology, if that's your background. But of course we want to be aware of how culture has shaped us.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: And one way to do that is to learn more about the psychological DivErSitY that Henrik talks about.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: That brings us to part three. Deeply cultural.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: So let's dig a bit deeper into.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: HendriK's work, and let's start with a quote of his from an interview he did.
A lot of what you read in psychology textbooks, or any of your typical psychology papers, come from sampling one particular population. And as psychologists and anthropologists and economists began to measure psychology around the world, we found a great deal of variation along things like individualism, the relevance of shame versus guilt, the importance of analytic versus holistic thinking, the role of intentionality in things like moral judgment and a number of other areas. Time thrift, temporal discounting. And I could keep going, wow, that's.
[00:25:27] Speaker C: A lot to digest. But Henrik is saying that our minds are deeply cultural. Many aspects of our psychological makeup are shaped by the society that we grew up in.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: But let's pause to point out how different this is from dominant ideas in intercultural education.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: That's so true. Intercultural educators often talk about cultural difference in terms of value orientations, and that treats culture as a factor that influences behavior. Because you value this, you do that which is a kind of cause and effect thinking. And this is supposed to explain cultural difference.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: What you end up with is a list of different value orientations.
Individualism, power, distance, uncertainty, avoidance. And I think this is what Liu Liu was referring to, the feeling that many cultural models are like taxonomies, a list, a set of categories.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: But Henrik talks about how culture shapes the architecture of our mind, the psychological structures which allow us to navigate successfully in daily life. And I think that is a more contextualized, perhaps even more holistic way of looking at culture.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: I like this idea that culture shapes the architecture of the mind. It's not some x factor that causes us to do things. It's what allows us to be psychologically in sync with our surroundings.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: And also, talking about culture as a set of categories does not show the interrelation between different aspects of culture. In other words, individualism is not just valuing independence. It is related to other cultural patterns.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Yes, Henrik uses the term individualism complex to talk about other cultural patterns associated with individualism. And so here's another quote.
At the core of it is the notion that we think of ourselves as unitary selves and not as a node in a relational network.
And that tends to have clustering around it, things like overconfidence, a reliance on guilt versus shame, a tendency of self enhancement. So putting your best foot forward, emphasizing your attributes and suppressing your deficits or deficiencies.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Henrik explains that this individualism complex developed in Europe for very specific reasons. Many of them related to the breakup of kinship networks due to the practices of the Catholic Church, which discouraged cousin marriage, for example, and encouraged individual property ownership rather than collective ownership.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: This encouraged nuclear families. People found marriage partners in other communities and started new forms of association, such as professional guilds. And there's a lot more to the argument than that. But the key point is that changes in society triggered shifts in psychology, and.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Religion played an important role in this. Another example is that universalist religions, which have a belief in heaven and hell, encourage higher levels of social trust. The feeling that God is watching all of us makes it easier to believe that strangers will behave fairly.
[00:29:29] Speaker C: And so this is how people in weird countries started to think of themselves as unitary selves focused on developing their inner qualities.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: That is different from India, where there is always a feeling of what will people think? That everything you do have an impact on the people around you.
[00:29:52] Speaker C: In many ways, I'm not a typical turkish man. Perhaps I am even rather individualistic. But this collective sense of self is very much a part of me. I feel it whenever I sense that it is violated, especially when I'm abroad.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: And this brings us back to those ideal goals we often hear, like being a global citizen or going beyond culture.
This research is teaching us that just as there is no universal language, there is no universal mind. A culture is as deep as mind and body.
[00:30:40] Speaker C: So with all this in mind, I think it would be fun to ask questions so our listeners can reflect on their own psychological architecture.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: How about this? Does higher self esteem lead to greater happiness?
[00:30:58] Speaker A: Well, I think many Americans will definitely say yes. Psychologists talk about self esteem, self worth, self confidence.
Someone with quote unquote low self esteem might be told to see a therapist.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Well, for enmeshed communities in India, happiness is not something that comes from within, it comes from between.
[00:31:22] Speaker C: It's the same for me because in the turkish context, focusing on your own needs and desires is regarded as being selfish.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: So an emphasis on self esteem is not a universal aspect of human psychology. People in more interdependent societies focus on other esteem your standing among the people you're close to.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Here's another question related to weird psychology.
Is a person's intentions important when judging behavior?
From the weird psychology perspective, it is. But for many people in the world, the effects of your action are more important than what you intended.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: And this is related to the weird tendency to think about people in terms of dispositions, stable internal qualities that are the same in all situations. We think of someone as being an honest person, or a clever person, or a kind person.
[00:32:26] Speaker C: Related to that, do people everywhere feel guilt when they do something wrong? And again, in a more relational society, shame may be a much more powerful feeling.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: Well, we have piled on a lot of information here, but there's one final thing I think we need to clarify. The same psychological dynamics that we see in weird societies can be found in other societies as well. For example, we hear that westerners are individualistic. But it's also true that chinese people coming from wheat growing regions of China are more individualistic than chinese people coming from rice growing regions.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: In other words, our mind is not shaped by geography. It's shaped by the patterns of the society we grow up in. In Japan, the Meiji restoration encouraged more individualistic psychology due to the breaking up of kinship networks, something that happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
So let's summarize a bit. Henrik's work reminds us that our mind is deeply cultural, and that talking about culture in terms of lists and categories may not capture its depth and complexity. Also, learning goals like intercultural competence can seem quite abstract.
And, you know, his work has also helped me see things in myself that I didn't fully recognize as cultural, like weird ideas about self esteem.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: And this has helped me understand why some key concepts in intercultural education, such as intercultural competence, feel a bit off in the indian context.
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Well, these are some issues I have been struggling with for years, such as translating key terms.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: And as we've been digging into these things for the podcast, I've really been feeling that intercultural education needs to take these insights into account. There is just so much new research. The paradigms are shifting. It's very exciting, but it is a bit daunting.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: And this is the last episode of season four. The podcast team will be brainstorming over the summer, and we will start season five in September with part two of beyond weird approaches, where we will look to the future of intercultural education.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: And I think that's a good place to end this episode. But first, let's look at some of our sources we've been talking about the 2010 article the weirdest people in the world by Joseph Henrik, Stephen Heine, and era Noren Zion, as well as Henriks 2020 book the weirdest people in the how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, and we featured quotes from a podcast interview Henrik did with Ezra Klein for the New York Times. Thats a very good place to start to get a sense for his work.
The Deep Culture podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute and I dedicated to intercultural education and research. I'm the director of JII. Do you want to dig deeper into these topics? You should definitely take Jii's brain, mind, and culture masterclass. To find out more, just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute and JIi members are developing educational materials to go along with the deep culture podcast. We currently have four teams hard at work, more updates to come, and all materials will be made freely available. If you're an educator who would like to join in the effort, get in touch at DC podcastapanentercultural.org.
special thanks to Liu Liu for sharing his thoughts today and to the rest of the podcast team, Ivan Vanderpoel, Zaina Matar and Danielle Glintz, and our sound engineer Robinson Fritz and Ikumi Fritz and everyone at GI. And of course, thanks to you Ishita and Emre for sharing this time with me.
[00:36:38] Speaker C: Thank you Joseph and Ishita. It was great to be here again.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Thank you Joseph and Emre. It was fun digging into this important topic with the two of.
