Intercultural summary Lio
Chapter 1: challenges of living in a global community
1. Small world experiment (Milgram, 1967)
- how many steps (via other people) does it take to connect two random people in the world?
- Participants in various cities in the US were asked to send a letter to a person in Boston
- If receiver was known: send to receiver
- If receiver was unknown: send to the most likely person in your network who might know them
- result: 5-6 steps (people) to get from start to end / “six degrees of separation“ (network theory)
2. 2012: small world experiment “2.0“
- Facebook calculated the distance between 2 random FB users
- Result: average of 3.57 “degrees of separation“ between them
- Seems like the world gets ´smaller and smaller´
3. The world as a village
- “global village“ (McLuhan, 1962)= describes future world in which communication technology
brings news and information to the most remote (entlegensten) parts of the world
- Today: information is ubiquitous (allgegenwärtig) (mass media); communication 24/7;
communication is potentially global
4. Globalization
- Process of interconnectedness between societies; events in one place of the
world have deeper effects on people and societies far away.
- worldwide interconnectedness in social life; no boundary between east and west
anymore
6. Globalization in business
- increase of trade around the world (especially large companies which produce in different
countries)
- Idea that world is developing one economy and culture because of improved technology
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,7. Do we live in a unified world? (Einheitlich)
- KOF Index of globalization (=misst das Ausmaß
der Globalisierung in 196 Ländern)
- Economic globalization: trade & investment
flows, import/export
- Social globalization: personal contact,
information flows, e.g. number of Mces, IKEA
stores…
- Political globalization: foreign embassies
(Botschaften) in a country, membership of international organizations, participation in UN
missions, involvement in intern. trade agreements
8. contributors to cultural contact / why is it easier to get cultural contact?
- advanced technology & transportation (e.g. easier to travel, interact online, smaller but more diverse
world)
- Challenge: understanding other cultures
- Global economy & business transactions (company expansions, diverse workforce, local markets
become more global)
- Challenge: understanding cultural tensions created by economic transformations (e.g. Brexit, EU,
Nato)
- mass migration & international exchange (e.g. temporary migrant workers, student exchanges)
- Challenge: facilitating intercultural co-existence in our society
Additional article: Hofmann & Doan (2018)
intercultural differences: core or surface differences?
- emotions: strong feeling & mental reaction (e.g. anger, fear); subjectively experienced, normally
directed toward a specific object/event; physiological & behavioral changes in body
- Emotions are learned and shaped in communication, during socialization
Basic emotions approach (1)
- started with Darwin (1872)- emotional expressions are biological (i.e. innate in the brain) & had
evolutionary adaptive value
- Basic emotions have universal, distinct, biological & physiological fingerprint in the body
- Basic emotions are universally recognized in all cultures (because they have the same biological &
physiological fingerprint, e.g. facial expressions)
- Basic emotions= the triggering of an innate emotion circuit (brain+body) as a result of a stimuli
Basic emotions approach (2)
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,- which are basic emotions?
- Ekman (1970): happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust/contempt
- Tompkins (1962): happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, interest, distress, shame
- Izard (1977): interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, shyness, guilt
Basic emotions approach (3)
- cultural influence on emotions:
- Basic emotions are innate, but what elicits them and how/if they are expressed are partially
dependent upon cultural factors (e.g. fear of an animal)
- Express
ion of
emotions is regulated by social appropriateness rules
The social constructivist approach (1)
- prominent & current representative: Lisa Feldman Barrett (Theory of constructed emotions; the
emotion paradox (2016))
- Recent meta- analyses:
- No evidence has been found of consistent neural and physiological fingerprint of various
emotions
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, - The various parallel outputs of emotional response don’t always occur together
The sociocultural aspects of emotion- Hofmann & Down (2018)
- emotions are not universally recognized in facial expressions
- People agree on the emotion on a face if they are from the same culture
- People agree on a face if that’s caricatured or posing, but not in naturally moving faces
- emotional identification of a face can be affected by priming
- Some people don’t score well on emotional granularity (differentiation) while others excel at it
- Experience of emotions= interception (body state) + emotion concepts + past experiences=
categorization
The sociocultural aspects of emotion- Hofmann & Down (2018)
- cultural influence on emotions:
- Emotion concepts are different based on past experiences and socialization
- Emotion expression is different based on past experiences and socialization
- Emotion perception, as an act of categorization, dependent on prior knowledge as much as visual
stimuli
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