Culture - The Force That Judges. Friday's Edition
The force is within us. Series 19 #5
Think about the last time someone rubbed you the wrong way.
Not someone who insulted you or did something objectively harmful. Someone who just felt off. Maybe they talked too loudly, stood too close, or didn’t look you in the eye. Maybe they interrupted you three times in five minutes, or sat silently while you waited for a response that never came. Maybe they showed up twenty minutes late and acted as if nothing happened, or they showed up thirty minutes early and made everyone feel rushed.
You made a judgment. You probably made it in seconds. And you probably believed it was accurate because it was obvious. But those judgments say more about your programming than about the other person.
An Australian project manager flies to South Korea to lead a software launch with a Korean team. In the first meeting, he asks each team member to share their individual progress and flag any problems. No one speaks. The senior Korean manager offers a brief group update. The Australian pushes: “I need to hear from each person directly.” The room stays silent. After the meeting, he writes in his report that the Korean team lacks initiative and the senior manager is controlling.
This, of course, is not accurate. The Korean team operates from a collectivist cultural perspective where the leader speaks not individuals. Individuals who bypass their manager to address a foreign executive publicly would shame their superior and break the team’s cohesion. The senior manager’s group update wasn’t control, it was protection, and the silence wasn’t passivity, it was respect.
The Australian read every signal through his own cultural perspective: individualism (each person should speak for themselves), achievement orientation (flag problems openly so we can fix them), and low power distance (hierarchy shouldn’t prevent honesty). He applied three of his own dimensions to people running entirely different software and concluded they were deficient.
The Korean team judged the Australian just as quickly. His insistence that individuals speak up was aggressive and disrespectful to their manager. His directness was an accusation that the team was hiding problems. His casual tone with the senior manager signaled that he didn’t respect his position. From their cultural perspective, he lacked basic social awareness.
Both sides walked away confident in their assessment. Both were wrong.
This pattern repeats everywhere, not just in conference rooms. A Danish exchange student in India arrives at her host family’s home, drops her bag in her room, and announces she’s going for a run by herself. She wants to go for a run, but she also wants to show the family that she is independent and does not need to be looked after. The family is confused: why would a guest leave the house alone on her first evening? They prepared tea, invited relatives, and planned an evening around welcoming her. She sees their concern as overprotective. They see her independence as rejection. She’s running on individualism and self-direction. They’re running on collectivism and relationships. Neither person is being difficult; they are following cultural programming that they are unaware of.
This is what misjudgment looks like from a cultural perspective. It doesn’t feel like bias. The Australian didn’t think “I’m applying my cultural framework to this team.” He thought, “This team has a problem.” The Danish student didn’t think “my host family runs different cultural software.” She thought “they’re being clingy.” The judgment arrives already finished, already certain, and already wrong.
This week has mapped how that happens. Tuesday showed that your culture decides what you pursue. Wednesday showed it controls what you express. Thursday showed it sets the rules for who matters and when things happen. Friday’s point ties them together: when someone violates any of these invisible rules, you don’t think “their programming differs from mine.” You think “something is wrong with them.”
That instinct is the most powerful product of cultural programming, and it’s the hardest one to override because it disguises itself as observation.
Saturday’s Core Brief will offer tools to recognize when you’re running on autopilot and how to choose a response rather than react from your programming.
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