When I was very young, my grandfather's cousin Sue relayed a story about an American woman friend who was living in London as an ex-patriot for a time. An issue that came up for this woman was her worry that she instinctively used an American approach to apologies when riding the London "Tube" instead of the British approach. So whenever she accidentally stepped on someone's foot or bumped into someone on the Tube, she automatically said, "Oh, Excuse me!" The British, she observed, always seemed to say simply "Sorry!" in the same situation. Months passed, and then one day when she happened to step on a stranger's foot, she suddenly said, "Sorry!" and the other woman turned to her and said, "Oh, excuse me!"

I remembered this story while reading an article by Xiaowen Guan, Hee Sun Park, and Hye Eun Lee, called "Cross-cultural difference in apology" in the January 2009 edition of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, or IJIR. Like Cousin Sue's friend, these three researchers asked people in the USA, China, and Korea to think about the situation of stepping on someone's foot in a train or bus, and their expectations about apologies. Though it can be amusing to read a very academic analysis of an everyday behavior, it is interesting to think about why we apologize and the role culture plays in this. After categorizing apologies according to the intent, desire, obligation and norms of the one apologizing, Guan and colleagues put forth some hypotheses about how culture influences apologies, and learned from their research that they were wrong!

The researchers had supposed that apologies would be more common in collectivist societies than in individualistic ones, but in fact, the Americans in the study showed a greater tendency to apologize than either the Chinese or Korean study participants. Though someone might accidentally step on another person's foot on the train or bus in any of these cultures, the variations in response don't seem to relate to how individualistic or collectivist are the people involved.

Of the three possible other explanations they provide:

(1) that Americans don't ride public transportation much so don't step on others' feet so often;

(2) that the American sense of personal space makes such an accident more offensive to the other person; or

(3) that the lower context US culture demands more of a spoken apology;

I vote for number 2. Living in New York and riding the subway daily, it certainly feels to be the norm that both the person stepping on the foot and the person stepped on will immediately apologize: the one for stepping on the foot and the other for being in the wrong place when the other person was stepping. Sometimes when this doesn't happen, you can hear a loud request for an apology, using indirect communication (a cry of pain, for instance) or direct communication ("Watch where you're going! You stepped on my foot. You could at least apologize.")

Ritual apologies
In this New York, and probably USA context, there is an enforced norm to apologize quickly for any accidental invasion of personal space. "Excuse me" or "Sorry" may now be equivalent, but whenever I realize that I have really injured someone in such an accident, I feel obliged to say more. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you OK?" I need to show more sincerity and not just ritually take the blame and move on.

Several months ago I wrote about genres of communication having different cultural norms. The apology is one such genre that can look very different across cultures. For instance a German AFS student in Hong Kong noted, "Here it's acceptable to belch out loud, but if you sneeze, you must apologize. Back home just the opposite is true."

When we cross cultures, we may feel strongly the obligation to apologize (or not to apologize!) in particular situations, and even if we speak the language perfectly, we may still want to express our own cultural selves by showing respect in the way we most expect. In Claire Kramsch's excellent book, Context and Culture in Language Teaching, she gives an example of an American student in Germany who is asked by her host father to close the door after she entered the room. She wants to say, "Oh, I'm sorry" as she does this, but no apology is expected by her host father. She considers several options for a German term and chooses "Entschuldigung" because it just felt disrespectful and impolite to say nothing.

I thought of this recently when reading a message from a Japanese speaker who was completely fluent in English, but chose to use a more Japanese style, apologizing for being the one to take the post of a beloved colleague who was retiring. I believe he understood well that an American speaker would never think to apologize for replacing someone who was retiring, but it must have felt disrespectful and simply wrong not to communicate in this Japanese way. It was a strong message, coming from one cultural context to many others, asking for good will and cooperation, honoring a colleague, and communicating respect.

If we are to communicate meaningfully across cultures, we will necessarily be communicating from the perspective of our own culture, and that will often include using some of our own cultural modes of communication, translated and/or explained.

In my own inadequate way I hope to do this as well.

Bettina Hansel

Ever since I ran across this July 2007 article by British journalist Charles Bremner on French attitudes toward their president's running habit I've wondered about how people characterize and stereotype political culture. Attitudes and assumptions about exercise are also part of the cultures we create together, and so they vary widely. I shared the Bremner article with a group of AFS staff last year who were participating in a training seminar on intercultural learning. Sure enough, our French participant did agree that probably it would be typical for the French to view Sarkosy's running habit as being anti-intellectual. She noted that she did not work out or go to the gym, and that it wouldn't be very "French" to do so. She associated running in the park with rich businessmen who want to be like Americans. (All this was before the big economic meltdown in the USA.)

I had never thought of exercise as particularly right wing or left wing. Then today on the radio, I heard this story (link below) about US Republican Congressman Dave Drier who is essentially trying to "force" the members of congress to engage in some type of morning exercise program as an example to the American public of preventive health care and efforts to combat obesity. A podcast and video are available. So maybe exercise is conservative in the USA also and I didn't know it.

I polled the AFS staff taking the seminar about the attitudes they found in their own cultures regarding exercise. Some of the responses:

• I'm from Latin America and in general, can tell that we pay a lot of attention to how we look. It is very common to go to the gym and jog and usually to be on some kind of diet.
• Jogging is fashionable for higher society people, done in parks, preferably in expensive clothes, with a partner or mp3. (Czech Republic)
• People are too busy. Those who regularly exercise are the retired people. (Hong Kong)

Each morning as my husband and I walk to the subway we pass a small group of older Chinese women and one man doing exercises in a small park and playground next to the road. It's a particularly Chinese form of exercising, always outdoors regardless of the temperature. Exercises include swinging their arms and clapping their hands, as described by the All China Women's federation on their website. It looks like fun. But is this the exercise of "retired people" for the Chinese? Is it old-fashioned or modern, among Chinese in the USA? Do Chinese immigrants of every education level do these exercises?

Exercise may also be connected to spirituality. Many years ago I had a friend who, as a cancer survivor, joined some special Qi Gong classes. She loved them because they were gentle and fun, and she did feel better, but she was at the same time quite skeptical of some of the spiritual messages that came with the program. Trained in Western scientific thought in an atheist tradition, she couldn't make sense of the program intellectually, and could not explain at all why she was feeling better as a result of the classes. In short, she lacked the cultural context for the exercises she was doing, and was acting like many sojourners who find themselves in an inexplicable environment. She tried not to judge it as "mumbo jumbo" and gamely went along with whatever was happening without really trying to understand it.

It's not possible to explore every fascinating aspect of cultural differences, but by studying and reflecting on cultural differences like the differences in attitudes toward exercise, I find I learn more and more about my own culture and about myself. It's a journey I will continue.

Bettina Hansel

Reset Button

A recent news article in the New York Times caught my attention. It described the cultural miscommunication occasioned by Hillary Clinton's gift to Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov: A red "reset button" as a symbol of the intentions of the USA's new government to start fresh in building its relationship with Russia. If you watch the video below, you might suppose that the miscommunication is just a matter of a somewhat unfortunate typo, easy to overlook and forget.

But of course there is more to read between the lines than the smiles on the faces. In the U.S. we often say of a gift "It's the thought that counts." And I certainly believe that the "thought" was well intentioned. Hillary Clinton sought a way to symbolize a new beginning, to connect to a remark by the U.S. Vice President Biden, a way to use laughter to break tension.

Humor doesn't always translate well, as I pointed out in a blog post from January 2008, even had the correct Russian word been used on the button (which, it should be noted, was printed in the English or Roman alphabet instead of the Russian alphabet). That is why it struck me as a risky gesture for important high-level diplomacy. But part of diplomacy is also being able to recover from a few cross-cultural faux pas and to look beyond the style to read and communicate the intent.

The reset button is of course a metaphor, stemming from the reset of electric circuit breakers when there has been an overload or a short in the system. Video games and other electronic devices also have a reset feature that lets you essentially start over after you've made a terrible mess of whatever it was you were doing. So I would imagine that in giving the reset button, Hillary Clinton was thinking about wanting to undo a terrible mess in the relationship between the USA and Russia and start over from some default point.* But I'm not sure that everyone would think it a good idea to have it so clearly pointed out that our relationship has problems, especially on video tape in front of dozens of clicking cameras to catch every moment.

But back to the gift of a large red button, however labeled. As someone who grew up in a Cold War environment in the USA, a big red button in the context of the USA and Russia evokes images of the button that would be pushed to start a nuclear war. As the two of them pushed the button together, wouldn't this context also go through their minds? The message of the reset button starts to become confusing.

On top of that, is a joke an appropriate way to begin a new relationship? In the USA we often do use humor to remove tension, which is why it is so common for public speakers to begin their speeches with a joke. Jokes are used in board rooms and churches, and humor may even find its way into a funeral; but on the other hand, very few people in the USA would think to begin an interview with a perspective employer with a joke. Weddings also seem to be serious matters, and while there may be jokes at weddings, they may not always be well received.

What about joke gifts? In how many cultures is it common to give humorous gifts? Certainly this happens in the USA, and there are lots of humorous birthday cards and "gag" gifts that tease people about getting older. My husband gave me a joke hat on my 50th birthday, for instance, but he also gave me a couple of very nice, serious gifts. Otherwise I would not have been happy. It's not that I expected anything lavish or expensive from him: just something thoughtful, something that showed that he cares. Joke gifts are also given among friends in New Zealand, according to my sources. But in Russia? It wouldn't be common, my colleagues tell me. Nor in France, where a colleague tells me that a plastic throw-away toy like this would be quickly dismissed. "It's not really a relationship-building item."

One has the sense that Clinton and Lavrov made the best of an awkward situation, and the world is not going to fall apart because of it. And perhaps that's what intercultural learning is about. Like any bridge, the bridges we build across cultures require constant repair.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

______________________________________

*I suppose it's somewhat natural that this button analogy has moved on to the economy, where we are dismayed to learn: There is no reset button.

Power Distance

I don't talk very often about the cultural value dimensions of Geert Hofstede, mostly because the research that originally led to the discovery of these factors is fairly old now, and the specific numeric values attributed to each national culture are specific to that time period. For example, in terms of the "Uncertainty Avoidance" dimension: I am certain that the numerous law suits and new regulations in the USA over the last several decades has made the US as a society much less willing to assume risk, though of course we see what happened when the banking industry was able to bundle a lot of different risks into financial investment packages. There are different realms to risk taking. A professional gambler may always wear a seat belt when traveling by car.

In short, one number on a scale never gives a full sense of how to characterize a society's values, though it can be useful for comparison. Here is a brief clip of Geert Hofstede from a video produced by EFIL, the European Federation of Intercultural Learning, which is an umbrella organization of AFS partners in Europe, and made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/

Lately I've been thinking about Power Distance, the Hofstede dimension that deals with the extent to which a society accepts inequality. I recently watched a television show dramatizing the life of John Adams who represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress of the 13 colonies in America that in 1776 declared their independence from Britain. Watching the supposed drafting of this Declaration of Independence, we see an imagined Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson discussing the final wording: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..." Of course, women were not self-evidently equal, nor were the slaves. Both these points were touched on by characters in the show, of course, since it is a 21st Century USA production. But I came away with the sense that this equality is still not self-evident.

But equality nevertheless is part of the US belief system, though perhaps less so than, say, in Denmark or Austria or New Zealand, according to the data from Hofstede. Exchange students from the USA or countries who similarly have a strong belief that all people are supposed to be equal sometimes find themselves in a country where the Power Distance dimension is higher -- where inequality is accepted as a fact of life, and some people are expected to hold more power than others. Some are expected to lead and make decisions, and some are expected to serve. It's not that anyone particularly judges this to be a "good" thing, but in a place like India, for example, what's self-evident is that all people are NOT equal in basic ways like wealth, education, and status.

In the USA, to the extent we believe that all people are in fact equal, we may then blame those who seem less capable for not taking full advantage of their possibilities because we also believe very strongly in individualism -- that each person is in charge of his or her own destiny in many important ways. For those who see the inequality that exists in fact in terms of opportunity, in terms of access to education and resources, all of this blame is terribly unfair.

Of course, while there are obvious differences in power that can be found within even the low power distance cultures, but the power differences between countries and between ethnic groups must also be taken into account in understanding the context of the relationships you may be trying to build across cultures. Trust and respect are the essential tools for cross cultural communication because there usually is some element of power difference if not a competition for power. It's not enough to just know the other culture and its norms to build a relationship. 

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS Intercultural Programs

When is formal more comfortable?

Many years ago when my grandmother was still alive but already in her 90s, she was hospitalized for some emergency surgery that saved her life for several more years. I visited her in the hospital and remember my sense of shock that the nurses aides who were about my age were calling my grandmother by her first name. At that time I still called all my parents friends by their titles and family names: Mr. and Mrs. Glen, Mrs. Hanson, Mrs. Murphy, Mr. and Mrs. Daniels. I knew their first names, of course, because they were all good friends of my parents, but using their first names seemed disrespectful. I wondered how my grandmother felt, being called "Agnes" by such a young woman.

I started thinking about this after reading my colleague, Chander's recent blog where he provided a slide show of various communication styles presented as bimodal contrasts: direct and indirect, linear and circular, and formal and informal among others.

These days, communication in the USA is largely informal. I no longer expect the nurses' aides taking care of my mother call her Mrs. Hansel, though my husband does. And I rarely think of calling myself Mrs. Hansel or expecting anyone else to do so. The opinion seems to be that speaking informally to people will make them feel more comfortable, that it's more friendly, or that it's more candid and therefore trustworthy. Formal speech may seem insincere. We use casual styles of speaking because we like to view others as our equals. But even when we are not being rehearsed for an audience with Queen Elizabeth, there are many occasions when speaking informally seems startling, particularly when visitors from other countries are involved. My husband and I still laugh at the time when we took a European guest to a restaurant nearby. To order a beer with his meal, our guest asked the waitress, "May I have a Heineken?" to which she simply answered, "No." After we all had a good laugh, she explained that, in fact, they were out of that particular brand.

In places where a more formal approach is the norm, it can have the advantage of making relationships more predictable, especially between strangers. One might have expected our waitress to respond, "I'm terribly sorry, but we are out of that brand at the moment. May I suggest another?" But maybe in a culture with a more formal communication style, a restaurant may quickly alter its menu if a particular item is unavailable in order to avoid confusion.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education & Research

AFS International

Private Lives

In the early hours of the morning when I was somewhere between awake and asleep and with my eyes still closed, my attention was drawn to a slightly smoky, slightly spicy and faintly familiar odor. I hesitated a minute before I recognized what it was. It was a smell I remembered from India. Opening my eyes I realized where it was coming from. I had put an Indian bed sheet on my bed for the summer when I don't need the additional warmth of a blanket. And it's a beautiful sheet which I brought back from India ... in 1992. It's been through numerous washes over the years but still has not lost its color, nor has it completely lost its odor, at least in my dreams.

It reminded me of the lingering traces of the cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior we learn in childhood that still cling to us long after our context changes and we intend to take on a new pattern. Like the storks who no longer bother to fly after living under nets as fledglings, we sometimes find it hard to escape those ingrained patterns and beliefs even when we have every reason to escape them. One of these ingrained patterns for me is my reluctance to ask people about their relationships, their feelings, their opinions. It's somewhat of a joke that I am always the last person to know the office gossip.

And I know where it comes from:

"Mind your own business!"

Somehow the pattern emerged when I was still a child that some questions I asked were perceived as prying into affairs that were private to the individuals involved and therefore should be none of my concern. Not wanting to be a "busybody" or gossip, I learned to refrain from asking people questions about their personal lives. If they wanted me to know, they would tell me. I learned I shouldn't ask. Now this seems to me to be an extreme form of the concern for privacy that was characteristic of the US culture during the time I was growing up.

"Don't ask. Don't tell."  

A familiar restriction on asking about other people's private lives was made a policy in the US military during the Clinton administration. While intended to find a way to allow homosexuals to serve in the military rather than automatically being discharged, the essence of the policy was this: Your private behavior may be contrary to military regulations, but at long as I don't ask you about it and you don't tell me about it, then we agree that it doesn't exist.  But of course, this does mean that I can't know you very well or really be a close friend, and I may have to pretend not to recognize some essential aspects of your identity because they are different than what is allowed.

Today, one the one hand there are myriad privacy policies that we acknowledge reading even when we don't, while on the other people seem very willing to tell all sorts of things about themselves to almost anyone. And they are being judged on what they put out there, with stars, comments, and sharing on Facebook.

"I don't mean to pry, but . . . "

I still worry about invading someone's privacy. Am I someone you trust enough to share these details of you life with me? This timid restraint that prevents me from getting to know you is not so useful to me these days. I now believe that it doesn't so much protect your privacy as it locks out our opportunities for meaningful exchanges. And for relationships across cultures, or even across genders, it is absolutely necessary to ask questions and show my curiosity and my interest in your life because I cannot assume that my own experience gives me the basis to understand yours. If I am to understand who you are, will need you to tell me, and if you don't think to do so, I'll have to ask.

"Curiosity killed the cat."

How many times did I hear this growing up? Don't be curious? Curiosity is dangerous? Why was this value promoted? But it's not so easy to lose the old habits. I still hesitate.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Changing my mind 

I have been reading Richard Nisbett's book, The Geography of Thought which makes a nice added reading to Hayashi's workshop on Perceptual Flexibility that has been the focus of my last two blogs. Back home in New York, deeply immersed in a range of work and daily routines, I find it difficult to use my imagination in quite the same way as I was able to while in Portland. Yet it seems so important to try. I think what impressed me most both in Hayashi's workshop and in the Nisbett book were the creative possibilities unleashed when you can change the the way you think.

When I think of digital and analog, I think of my own preference for the analog watch. Somehow seeing the position of the hands on the face of a clock or watch gives me a "feeling" for what time it is, while reading the numeric output of a digital clock is a mental exercise. With a digital clock, I don't see how near or far away from 10 o'clock it is, for instance, at 9:38, which teases me numerically into thinking it's really only half-past nine (or "half nine," as the Irish would say) in the same way that the $19.95 price tag on something doesn't sound nearly as expensive as the $20 it nearly costs you. The fact that I'm talking about the feeling of $20, or the feeling of 20 minutes (or 1/3 of an hour) shows an analog tendency.

Swinging between analog and digital

Perceptual flexibility means using more than just one way of thinking. Hayashi taught us to pay attention to our movement along three curved dimensions or arcs that are defined by something like polar opposing mindsets, and he gave us some exercises for us to "swing" back and forth between the poles of these arcs. Thinking of this as a swing is useful because the flexibility demands that move back and forth in our conversations and negotiations with people from other cultures, and one never rests at the polar ends of the swing. These exercises take practice, but I felt most successful in swinging along the digital and analog arc, even when I wasn't always so sure what might be considered digital and what would be analog.

What do I perceive digitally? Anything I describe by putting it in a category. It's a car, a box, a calendar. It's things that have properties, and the Nisbett book is helpful in explaining how common it is for people in the USA to teach their children nouns and explain their properties. Whether you put the adjective before the noun (as in English) or after the noun (as is typical for French and Spanish) the noun tends to be the focus of much of "Western" thinking and the adjectives highlight the properties. So we analyze things and take them apart, and take them out of their context. A German Shepherd dog in a city apartment is not seen as a different kind of dog than the German Shepherd dog on the farm. We group them together in a broad category of "dogs" with a sub category which is German Shepherd.

But what if I swing the other way, and instead of paying attention to the dog, I pay attention to the activity going on. I first notice that this photo is taken in a field. It is in a rural area, near the mountains and two dogs are looking up expectantly, seemingly waiting for something to happen. They look wet, and the caption says that the dogs are playing at the lake. Well, the caption is some digital information but otherwise I'm thinking about my subject more holistically, in a more analog fashion, with the greatest attention paid to the context and what the dogs might be doing. I don't just say, "It's a photo of two German Shepherd dogs." According to Nisbitt's book, this way of thinking about the photo would be more "Eastern" than "Western" and he has many studies that confirm this kind of broad difference across cultures.

I'm sure that my notes from my three-day workshop with Hayashi and the Nisbett book will find their way again as my thinking evolves.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Pearls

When we are in a dialogue with someone from another culture, what do we do with the cultural differences that emerge? Milton Bennett has often talked about the situation where each person adapts in some way to the other culture and in the process a "virtual third culture" is created that is used by both people during the time that they are in contact with each other.

In an abstract, theoretical way, this makes perfect sense and I am sure that examples abound, but I don't actually have a good one in my head, in part because I always feel the back and forth of the two cultures. On the other hand, last week at Kichiro Hayashi's workshop on Perceptual Flexibility, I found an evocative image that works less on a theoretical or digital level and more on an emotional and analog level. More about digital and analog in a future post.

What is it, then, that happens when two people with very different ways of thinking find themselves wanting to or needing to work together? I found myself in this position not so long ago, in conjunction with a project here at AFS. My colleague from Malaysia was approaching the task at hand with a strong need for a particular framework to unify the concepts. Ten years ago, I would have probably said, "What is he talking about?"

As Hayashi explained in the seminar, we often react to the foreign concept like we do to a foreign body in our system: we either say, "Get this out of me" or perhaps we run away from it. But instead, he told us, we should let the foreign particle stay there and live with it in us. Don't try to immediately merge your idea with the other person's. Just let it be there for now. Stay with your own cultural way of looking at the issue in front of you, but now include this foreign element in your work and in your consciousness, even if it seems to contradict your own conclusions. Let it be equally a part of your work. Let the contradictory parts stand next to each other, equally valid and important. Take the time that is needed and continue to edit or refine your work while keeping the foreign element in it.

For those that ask "Well, where is this going? When are you able to reconcile the differences?" Hayashi assures us that the process of working with both cultural elements leads to a more creative approach that ultimately is more than either the sum or the average of the two parts. 

As I thought of this idea in our workshop, the image that came to me was that of a small piece of grit that gets into an oyster's shell. The oyster lives constantly with this foreign element working with it in an oyster's way to create a pearl. It can't be particularly comfortable, but something amazingly beautiful is created and the foreign element, that piece of grit that is no longer visible, is absolutely essential to the process of creating the pearl.

I realized how this worked because of my recent experience with my Malaysian colleague and the framework he was proposing that didn't seem to fit with my mentality. Rather than "rejecting it from my system" as I might have done in the past, I decided to assume first that my colleague had a useful and promising approach. Though I did not have a clear sense of where this would take me, I studied the new framework, tried to comprehend what was intended to do, and tried to connect it to the project we were working on together. We discussed terms and language quite a bit, back and forth in my early morning and his late night. I involved another colleague in this approach and we all compared our results from looking at the project through the framework.

In the end, I shifted my approach and came up with another way of working that does NOT in fact look very much like the framework of my Malaysian colleague. But it's at least 10 times better than what I was using before, and we've been using it within the working team in the past couple of months as a way to check to make sure everything is included.

SIIC Workshop #13 Photo Album

I wanted to show some photos taken on those reflective times of listening. Notice Regina Rowland's graphic art. When we ate meals or walked with others on the Reed College campus, people would ask, "Are you in the workshop that has those beautiful pages we see on the wall?"

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Perceptual Flexibility

I want to thank Kichom Hiyashi and Regina Rowland for the workshop I have been attending this week. My notebook is full of ideas that will come through this bog in the coming weeks. There is too much for just one report.

Much of the work we did is in the form of images, and Regina Rowland facilitated the workshop by providing incredibly beautiful images and words that communicated the content on another level as Hiyashi-sensei spoke to us persuasively and gently and with good humor. The three days were enormously challenging and intense, but in a way that builds excitement from the confusing possibilities that we have ahead of us. I do not feel any stress; rather I feel thoughtful and calm.  I don't yet know what will become of these ideas, but I know I will return to this blog space in a short time to talk about swinging back and forth between different mental approaches.

But on this sleepy Saturday, I'm much more able to talk about the images. As Hayashi described his ideas and metaphors and Regina interpreted these on huge sheets of white paper, the atmosphere was rich with a visuals. Several people also used VisualsSpeak photo packets as part of the work, and I conjured up my own images as we went along, both from memory and from imagination.

I will share now just one of my images that came from this three-day workshop. It concerns the storks I saw in Alsace last April. I have a nice photo here that I took at a stork sanctuary in Alsace. As you can see, I walked right up to the birds in their nest where they sit more or less in the middle of a picnic area. The stork is a symbol of Alsace, and so the people in that region established this sanctuary when they became concerned about the bird whose lengthy and treacherous migrations coupled with shifts in the local habitat seemed to decrease its numbers each year. The photo I'm showing here is not my image however. I didn't photograph the extensive nets that float about 5-8 meters above the ground as a soft roof over the fenced-in fields of the fledglings. Local wildlife managers move the young birds here after they hatch and keep them under the nets for the first few months as they are learning to fly. Then after some period of time, the nets are removed and the birds are free to roam and fly at will. The great majority never leave, though a few take up fairly high perches on chimneys in the surrounding village. But most have broken from the stork's migratory pattern and stay within the sanctuary borders. The analogy to the cultural patterns we learn early in life is such that we also often stick to particular behaviors and habits that may not be the only ones available to us. In particular, our own cultural patterns of thinking are used almost exclusively in spite of the fact that our brains are very good at learning and growing. Hiyashi called this pre-mature cognitive commitment and helped us find ways to change our thinking to allow us to make these shifts.

It's a fairly comfortable life for the storks at the sanctuary. They look very healthy. I don't project on them any wistfulness or longing to rediscover their Southern Hemisphere nesting grounds or to travel to far away places. But I do have that sort of longing and I hope to stretch my capacities. The cultural nets that formed the way I think were also useful to me, like the child's training wheels on a bicycle, but they have been gone for some time now, and I can decide where to go and how to get there.

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International.

"Instead of simply accepting the existence of a cultural difference, a tolerant person agrees to allow a difference to impact his or her life."

I found this to be a very meaningful way to think about intercultural learning and to understand how difficult it can be. It means that my openness to another culture is only as great as my willingness to change my life. So I think again about the five frameworks. As the frameworks suggest, it is much easier for me to change my language use -- how I greet people, what language I use -- than it is to change my beliefs, values and assumptions or the way I think.

I can't believe what I don't believe. This is what I used to say when contemplating certain religious beliefs, for example, or even scientific beliefs. I remember vividly from my high school physics class my disbelief that the moon had anything to do with controlling the tides. "That makes no sense," I thought. Now, when faced with something I don't believe, I am more inclined to ask, "Can I imagine believing this?" and "What would it mean if I believed this?" and "Why do I believe what I do?"

I have watched the changes over decades in what I have believed to be true, and found it less and less easy to judge. Sometimes I appear to hold completely contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Being able to do that makes it easier for me to contemplate letting someone else's belief impact my life. It's not easy, still. I am still very much bound by the logic I've been taught, by perceiving mostly what I've been taught to perceive and not noticing that which has never been called to my attention as something important.

This is still what fascinates me about learning another culture.

I'm heading to Rome on Saturday ... so you can imagine my interest in this New York Times article that appeared on Monday: Is Cuisine Still Italian Even if the Chef Isn't? It seems that there is some concern that Italian cooking will lose its flavor if immigrant chefs are increasingly getting creative in the kitchen. 

So often we see people worrying about the loss of a culture, and the threat of the influence of another culture, whether from immigration, as described here, or from global dominance as......well, as in the USA's global reach.

I have to accept that this is a real concern for those affected, while at the same time realizing that culture is not a thing to be lost but rather a creation of a group of people. The fear is not really the addition of, say, cinnamon in the panna cotta, (as proposed here by a Danish sugar company -- you can try it if you want), but rather the fear of the loss of control over the process of change. Italian culture and Italian cooking have evolved over hundreds of years. To stop that process and preserve the way it exists today would be to create a museum exhibit. You cannot preserve a culture if no one is creating it. The issues of one cultural group's power and control over other groups are quite worthy of concern, as is the openness of a cultural group to newcomers. But change is inevitable.

Over the next few weeks I will be reporting from Rome, Strasbourg, and Paris. Watch for my "eyes abroad" reports.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

On Monday (Listening) I posted the site of 6 Billion Others. One of the intriguing topics on that site was on nature, and what it means to these different individuals from various parts of the world. Then yesterday in the New York Times, I was struck by an article on Koreans who write Japanese poetry, in spite of the disapproval of their compatriots because of the political history between the two countries. It should not be forgotten that conflicts between cultures are often about power difference rather than cultural difference.

Nevertheless some of these Korean poets and their Japanese colleagues who write with them uncovered interesting and meaningful cultural differences between Korean and Japanese perceptions about nature, about beauty, and about emotion.

An excerpt from Japanese Poetry Persists in Korea, Despite Disapproval

Reiko Yamaguchi, a Japanese hotel manager and another club member, said writing haiku with Koreans had enhanced cultural understanding.

“Japanese and Koreans have different ways of perceiving nature,” she said. “Japanese tend to find maximum beauty when they see cherry flowers falling. Koreans’ hearts exult when the flowers are in full blossom.”

Mr. Rhee agreed: “It’s the same moon. But in haiku, Koreans sing the moon with our heart. To Japanese, our haiku may sound too subjective and hard to understand. Japanese sing the moon with their eye. They prefer realism. Koreans may find their haiku bare and superficial.”

Perhaps poets are especially equipped to appreciate such cultural differences in perception.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Listening

A colleague recently led me to this beautiful site called 6 Billion Others. Yann Arthus-Bertrand created this project of hundreds of testimonials from individuals all over the world on topics like fear, tears, joy, family, nature, and more. In his own testimonial about the project, he tells of being stranded for 24 hours in a small village where, through his conversations with one man from the villagers, he came away realizing that he had something profound to learn from the experience and outlook of every other person on earth. You can select a photo or a topic and see several people from different parts of the world present their views on this topic. While you hear the person speak, his or her words are also provided as English text.

While each of these testimonies presents an individual's experience and point of view, each also has a cultural context that is often identifiable, and that influences how that person thinks, what each values, and how each presents himself or herself. If you think again of the Five Frameworks of Culture, you can look for the differences in language use, non-verbal behavior, communication style, patterns of thinking (cognitive style), values and assumptions.

AFS Research News

This is a busy time for AFS research. We are finalizing our first report on our 15-country, Long-Term Impact Study. We expect to post this report on our web site sometime in April. If you would like to receive an email notice when it becomes available, please join the AFS research community for our Research Network newsletters.

In the meantime, much of my own time this week will be spent working on a fundraising proposal for research we hope to begin in 2009, and preparing for the Educational Colloquium next month in Paris: See our announcement in the Event Calendar.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Welcome back to Leo Hitchcock, Guest Blogger from New Zealand.

M-time vs. P-time

Something very odd seems to be happening to me!  Every time think to myself ‘it’s about time I contributed to Intercultural Eyes again’, I look in here to find Betsy has recently written something (Saving Time, March 10 – I am a bit slow!) that coincides with something I’ve just been reading about!  Do we have some ESP going on Betsy? 

I’m currently reading Edward T. Hall’s (1981), Beyond Culture.  Other writers claim that Hall was the first person to use the term ‘intercultural communication’ (in The Silent Language, 1959).  However I think our founder, Stephen Galatti probably beat him to that!, so let’s just say that Hall was the first to introduce the term into scholarly literature.  But, I’m getting off the point…

Hall discusses cultural differences relating to the perception of time.  When I read Betsy’s comments about her brief meetings with special friends while travelling on the train, however train schedules prevented their spending quality time together, Hall’s discussion immediately came back into my mind.  Reverse incidents regarding cultural perceptions of time came to my mind too as I was reading Hall!

Halls calls this monochronic time ('M-time' - everything according to a fixed, linear time schedule) and polychronic time ('P-time' - do things as they naturally occur, or ‘when it feels right’, even though you may be doing many things at once!).  (I don’t like 'monochronic/polychronic', I prefer 'monochronological' time and 'polychronological' time. Bigger words and not ‘chronic’ J.)

Hall explains it like this:  M-time is characterised by scheduling, by doing one task at a time.  Everything is time-dominated, with time so thoroughly woven into the fabric of existence that we are hardly aware of the degree to which it does dominate.  It affects relationships (as Betsy found out), and denies us context.  It permits only a limited number of events in a given time span with important things done first and ‘unimportant’ things done last - or not at all if time runs out!  P-time, on the other hand, is characterised by several things happening at once.  It stresses the involvement of people and complete completion of tasks rather then strict adherence to schedules. In P-time markets and stores, one is surrounded by other customers demanding attention, with no order to who is served next.  The same pattern occurs in governmental agencies, even hospital emergency rooms.

I think this is a very important concept for exchange students about to live and study in a new culture to understand, as it can be a source of frustration, and resistance to cultural adaptation.  When my partner and I travelled in Latin America several years ago, it was probably our first introduction to having to adapt to P-time.  We were not so much ‘frustrated’ or felt ‘resistance’ but we very soon understood that things will happen as they naturally occur, not according to some pre-fixed time on the clock face, so we just decided to ‘go with the flow’.  New Zealand’s indigenous culture, as well as the Pasifika (Pacific Islands) cultures (plural!) are also polychronological, so while it was new to us to experience it first hand, we were not totally unaware of what was happening.  My partner has recently returned from Spain where she attended the wedding of an AFS student we had with us a number of years ago (I couldn’t go - am I jealous or what!).  She commented about some of the TV programs there showing all the ad’s (like 30-odd!) at the end of the program rather than interspersed through the program.  This is an example of P-time.  Hall also mentions this example in his book.

Betsy highlights one of the problems with M-time.  I have a problem with my P-time-oriented Uni students – getting to class at the scheduled time! (Mind you, this problem is not restricted just to P-timers!)

Saving Time

This weekend I lost an hour. At least this is how I think of it. In the United States, most of us shifted the time on our clocks one hour forward for daylight savings time. So it seemed appropriate to address this issue to cultural concepts of time, including daylight savings time. What time are we trying to save? and for what?

Recently while riding the subway home from work, I happened to see a friend of mine, a person I have known for years, a person I truly care about. And yet, because he was getting off the train and I was getting on, we barely had time to greet each other, to smile and say "good to see you." Neither of us seemed to think that this unexpected meeting should cause us to miss our next train, to be late getting home to our partners, or to change what we had planned.

Some years ago, I also happened to meet a friend on the train, traveling in my direction to work -- again, someone I hadn't seen for a while. We spoke briefly for a few minutes, then she apologized, "You'll have to excuse me. I always read the paper on the train, and I need this time alone with my newspaper." I also had a newspaper in my briefcase, so after this, we continued to ride together, separately reading the same newspaper, only to say "good bye" to each other when one of us left the train.

These scenes on the train would be quite different had I run into my Iranian friend. Suddenly the priorities shift, practically automatically. What good luck that we would have, to run into each other just by chance! Best to take advantage of it, to catch up on our news, to understand how each of us is, to wish each other well. And because of this unexpected opportunity, I'd quickly let the train go on without me, knowing that there will be another in 10 minutes or less. And I would certainly leave my newspaper in my briefcase. But I still would not shift my schedule enough to, say leave the station to stop for a coffee. I have my other plans and commitments that I must keep, and being "on time" is part of that. On the other hand, my Iranian friend, who is easily "on time" for a morning run in the park on Saturday morning, places his priority more on these chance encounters and events which mean that the day's planned schedule is less and less close to reality as the day wears on. When I've invited him to dinner parties, he has seldom arrived within the first two hours. But he always comes.

Where do we learn to be prompt?

Lessons from childhood can be quite powerful. My very prompt husband remembers that his father kicked his bed every morning to make sure he got up in time and ready for school. Such a message could not be ignored. My daughter may remember the games we played to get her up and ready and "on time" for school. 

My own father was not always so prompt. He frequently got involved deeply in his work and would call home to say that he'd "lost track of time" and though he would be leaving now, he was going to be late for dinner. I would be sitting at the window, watching with my mother for my father's car to come home. Dinner was supposed to be ready when he got home, and usually it was keeping warm, or "getting ruined" because he was late.

The idea that "people are waiting for you" is strong and is part of the social commitment that many of us in the USA grew up with. This, of course, is the kind of commitment that pulls me to be prompt now. Like my father, I sometimes do get involved in my work. A project I begin at 4:30 almost never ends at 5:00 when it is time to go home. I like to get the project finished before I leave. So I am not always prompt either. My husband is almost always home from work first, and starts the dinner. Like I remember with my mother, I have seen him watching for me from the window sometimes as I come home. The salads may be already made, waiting for me. He is waiting for me. The evening is short, always and it is this "expected" opportunity that calls me much more strongly than the unplanned opportunity of a chance encounter.

I'm not sure that the "future" orientation I've described will continue to be characteristic of U.S. culture, at least at the social and personal level. The near universal use of cell phones, text messages and "twitters" may be changing how and whether "people are waiting for you" in our society, especially among the young and single. My suspicion is that the USA is, with the advent of instant communication, becoming less tied to our planned schedules and more open to last minute invitations and chance encounters in our social lives, though perhaps while still demanding rapid service in business and consumer areas. I'd like to hear more about how technology may be changing other cultures as well.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

East is West

When I lived briefly in India and watched the nightly Doordarshan news broadcasts on television, I was baffled for a while about the West Asian peace conferences that were going on at the time. What was going on in West Asia? I wondered. I don't remember when it dawned on me that what I had always known as the "Middle East" was, in fact, West Asia. How perfectly sensible that in India, where Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are most closely to the West, the region is given a more geographically accurate description! And since I supposed that the world had agreed somehow that the line separating Europe and Asia that runs through the Red Sea and the Bosphorous and then runs up somewhere along the ridges of the Urals mountains, I thought I should start a campaign to rename the "Middle East" -- a vestige, I supposed, of the British Empire's renaming of the world -- to the more technically correct "West Asia."
 
But now I see two problems with this:

#1 Other than the substantially large number of Indians who would already understand, within my own cultural context in the USA, most people would not immediately connect the familiar problems and debates about the Middle East with any discussion about West Asia. (See What is an Entrée? below.)

#2 I'm no longer sure that there is any worldwide agreement on the definition of continents.

How Many Continents does Earth Have?

When AFS Switzerland hosted our World Congress in 1996, our organization there created a lovely logo for the Congress, to be used on the folders, T-shirts, banners and so on. The logo included a circular shape encompassing five colors: one for each continent.

Five continents? I was taught there are seven! It seems that the Swiss put North and South America together as "America" while in North America, we separate them into two continents, and we count Antarctica as a continent as well, though we don't expect to start exchange programs there any time soon.

What is Western?

Lately I have been twice surprised by Belgians who were preparing research projects that included the view that South America is "non-Western." Even though I have been taught that it is a separate continent, I have also been taught that it is in the Western Hemisphere, and with the history of the Americas colonized largely by England, Spain, Portugal, France, and even the Netherlands, there is certainly a strong European influence all over our one or two continents.

These same Belgians were also surprised by my remarks that, as I felt my own US culture might lie in between Europe and South America on some dimensions. They had been certain that the US culture was clearly closer to Europe than it was to the "non-Western" cultures of South America.

I remember a discussion I had with a Mexican woman living in Belgium, who found her European surroundings very unfamiliar. However, stopping over in the USA on her way home, she told me she felt "halfway home" culturally in the USA. I understood her completely. The adjustments I make in my trips to Europe are quite different from those I make in Latin America. Or, I might say, I am misunderstood very differently in Europe than I am in South America.

What is an Entrée?

I give this example just to show how impossible it is to change established language use, even to "correct" it.

Anyone who knows French will recognize that "entrée" would be an entrance, a beginning, or what the British would call a "starter" on a menu at a restaurant. Why is this not true in the United States?

I have often wondered who was that very influential restaurant owner in the USA who wanted to give his restaurant more elegance, or to connect his cuisine (also a French word, of course) a French flavor? Whoever he was who first labeled the main course "Entrée" has forever changed the meaning of the word in the United States. Today, even a truly French restaurant in the USA would have to think twice about labeling the appetizer as "Entrée" because virtually all the customers will be expecting it to be the main course.

As we say in the United States: Some food for thought.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Getting comfortable with differences

In thinking about the results of the research conducted with AFS by Mitchell Hammer a few years ago, I was struck by two different outcomes.

1. When they return home from their experience, AFS students show a much lower level of social discomfort, anxiety, and embarrassment around other cultures than they had before they went abroad.
   
2. The returned students generally focused more on cultural similarities and some worried that paying attention to cultural differences would lead to conflict. In the words of one student:

"Ya que en el mundo en que vivimos, las diferencias culturales son inmensas, y es por eso que existe tanta violencia -- las personas no ven las similitudes, y el hecho de que todos somos iguales." ("In the world we live in, the cultural differences are huge and that is why there is so much violence -- people don’t see the similarities and the fact that we are all the same.")

This leads me to ask:

• Are these returning students more comfortable around other cultures because they focus on the similarities instead of the differences?

and

• Is this always a good thing?

and

Why should differences cause conflict?

Maybe this is the most interesting question. If we believe that differences inevitably cause conflict, how would we behave? In the USA we have an expression: "like walking on egg shells" -- the idea being that you need to tread very carefully for fear of breaking the delicate shell.

With this philosophy, any mention of differences can be dangerous, reminding the other person of the conflict we have, because... you know, because we're different. So maybe if we focus only on the ways we are similar, nothing bad will happen.

Another expression we use in the US: "You have to break some eggs to make an omelet."

When we introduced the Five Frameworks of Culture we followed Bennett's order; building trust by talking first about less threatening differences such as language use or non-verbal behavior, and then moving to on to talk about differences that might feel more threatening to consider, like values and assumptions.

Assumptions about love and marriage and family

What could be MORE threatening that looking at cultural differences in love, marriage and family. This is interesting because, first of all, we often tend to assume that these are universals. Everyone has the experience of falling in love, every society has marriage, all societies include families. True or False?

Let's look at some different reactions to these topics in different places, both of which surprised me.

India. Back in the early 1990s, while I was doing research in India, almost a young woman told me: "I'm happy to have my parents help in finding a husband. It's such an important decision." She mentioned how much her parents has always looked out for her best interests, and how well they understood her nature and would be able to select the right boy. Another woman told me, "I always wanted a love-match, but it didn't happen, so I was grateful that my brother was able to help me find my husband." I also carry with me still the image of the young Punjabi fiancés, meeting for the third time at a party normally designed as a celebration to tease the bride before her wedding. In this more modern couple, the groom-to-be was allowed to attend, and in fact sang a song for the bride while she danced. Was it only me who felt the chemistry  between them beginning to build with their smiles and blushes?

Contrast this with a situation familiar to me in the USA. It was about 5 years ago that I decided to marry again, and I brought my future husband to meet my mother. Thinking perhaps an "old fashioned" approach might be appropriate, he asked my mother for her approval of our decision. "Why are you asking me?" she replied. "I think it should be up to Betsy."

Where was anything in my background ready to expect the reactions of these Indian women who found comfort and even great pleasure in their arranged marriages? I suppose when I went to India, I imagined that the arranged marriage was "still" common, thinking perhaps that this was something that would eventually change to a more "western" pattern with time. And yet I related the "arranged" marriage with tragic stories from my own traditions, such as Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. For anyone who does not know, Juliet's family was arranging a marriage for her with the County Paris, someone they felt suitable, but she, of course, had fallen in love with Romeo, her family's enemy, and in the end the two lovers killed themselves.

Peru. Love is not always kind and marriage does not always mean living happily ever after. I don't intend to imply that marriage is any less successful in Peru than any place else, but the way this may play out was what surprised me. Walking down the street in Lima one evening, I observe two women fighting in front of me. They are yelling and striking each other. One justifies herself: "She was with my husband." Another woman I knew, suspecting her husband was with another woman, went directly to that woman's home, found him there and dragged him home so she could then kick him out of the house. "I would kill to keep my husband," she told me. Then there was the case of a jealous ex-novia who telephoned the new girlfriend, repeatedly, to talk endlessly about the situation and what the relationship had meant to her.

Again, I had stories from my own traditions that got in the way of my interpretations and made these situations quite uncomfortable. Wasn't it supposed to the two men fighting each other over a woman, like Popeye and his nemesis Bluto (sometimes Brutus) from television cartoons, fighting over Olive Oyl? And more than anything else, I felt embarrassed for the women and wondered --

• "Where is her pride?"

and

• "Why does she put up with him?"

and 

• "What can she hope to achieve by this?"

-- all questions that are clearly irrelevant in the cultural sub-context in which these women live.

What was more helpful was again to reinterpret the behavior without the cartoon and to recognize that I was seeing was a way to use a large dramatic gesture to assert their rights in their relationships. The fact that others witness this gesture can make it more powerful: Love overcomes pride.

Whether the stories from your own tradition are as revered as Shakespeare or as modest as a Popeye cartoon, the ones that you hear repeatedly, perhaps particularly when you are young, can be enormously powerful and will influence your reactions to anything you experience that remotely resembles the story line. By identifying these influential stories that led to my reactions, I can then try to remove the story context and look again at the behavior I observe.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Why do you communicate with someone?

Which of these purposes is most important?

• Convey information
• Show how you feel about your relationship
• Create a good impression
• Convey respect for the other person
• Reach agreement
• Maintain harmony
• Make the other person feel happy
• Maintain the other person’s interest
• Make sure the other person is comfortable and not embarrassed by the conversation.

The style you use to communicate with another person depends a great deal on how you answered this question, but it’s always about the nature of the relationship with the other person and the cultural conventions that shape that relationship. Is there a difference in status or rank in your relationship? Are relationships compartmentalized so that you have different relationships for different activities or areas of interest? Are you from the same or different cultural background?

It is not surprising that the intercultural field includes many whose training is in the area of communications. The way people communicate with each other does quite frequently vary with culture, and communicating across cultures is also different than within a culture. Some of this was touched on in the January 8 issue on humor.

One of the most frequently noted differences in communication style is the contrast between direct and indirect communication. The U.S. culture is often seen as tending to be more direct in its communication, but many cultures will use a direct approach for giving information. Malaysian and Japanese cultures may typically place a higher value on an indirect approach to save “face” and avoid expressing something that could cause the other person to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, but even in the U.S., people often try an indirect approach when they are worried about how their communication will be received. Another communication style difference frequently noted is the contrast between those who express emotion while communicating and those who are restrained in expressions of emotion. Here the Italians might be seen as more emotive in the communication and the British as restrained.

Mitch Hammer has developed a intercultural conflict styles inventory that looks at these two dimensions of difference and helps people identify their preferred style of communication when dealing with conflict. It’s a very interesting instrument, as it touches on areas of difference that can cause misunderstanding.

• Receiving communication that is too direct feels like criticism.
• Communication that is too indirect may not be received at all, or may seem deceptive.
• Emotionally restrained communication can sound as if you do not care.
• Emotionally expressive communication can sound as if you are out of control.

It’s useful to see how your communication might be misinterpreted, and to see how you may be misinterpreting others as well. I have taken the inventory several times, and each time I learn something, and each time result is different. Each time I’m focused on a different type of conflict, involving a different relationship and a different issue. Sometimes I think about the communication I would want to receive; sometimes I think about the communication I’m comfortable giving.

I can’t say that this shows an enormous ability on my part to code switch between cultural styles of communication; it’s probably rather huge ambivalence about conflict in general. But there are also many times when I feel it is so important to save face and times when I want to be able to show how important I feel the relationship is, or how much the issue is tied up with my own sense of self. Sometimes I really want to work through an intermediary who can plead my case and make my explanations for me. I’m not sure I ever do this well.

Sheila Heen, the author of the communications self-assessment tool embed below has created a communication style template based on their research of successful communication about difficult issues within the context of U.S. cultural norms. When I took the quiz, my results revealed that I should try to be more direct and that I should prepare more for having difficult conversations, and included some detailed advice on how I might do this.

The existence of this tool proposes that communication style is something that can be taught and deliberately used in a particular context. So, it may well be that even if I am less than perfect in the communication style seen as typical of the USA, those coming from other cultures might use this quiz to learn how to adjust their communication style to deal with a difficult issue they have with a colleague from the USA. Just don’t expect your U.S. counterpart to conform perfectly to the “Have the talk America” style.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Research, AFS International

On December 10, 2007 I reported on an article in Intercultures, an online Canadian magazine, that focused on cultural differences in cognitive style, or patterns of thinking.

My husband recently led me to this item.

I'm not a fan at all of the title "hard-wiring" since it implies something immutable and not learned patterns. Contrary to the title, the research that is reported shows different "training" of the brain in different cultures and documents different ways of thinking about an experience through the intensity of activity in different parts of the brain in individuals from different cultures.

Most interesting for AFS is the suggestion of the researchers that perhaps brain patterns change with an exposure to another culture. "There's a hint that six months in a culture already changes you," he said, referring to psychological, rather than neurological, research. "It suggests that there's a lot of flexibility."

Bettina Hansel

Director of Research, AFS Intercultural Programs