After participating in a Cultura-style online intercultural exchange like the one used in Chun and Wade's study, I feel that I've gained a little insight into one of the psychological factors that may have led to the students' tendency to miss out on important cultural differences. Reading the study, I first assumed that students were a) inattentive to the initial data presented to them, b) so nervous about talking to strangers from another culture that their higher reasoning functions were inhibited, or c) some combination thereof. While these factors may have played a role for some of the students, my own experience has me wondering about another possibility: that taking stock of one's own culture as a totalized object of inquiry is just hard, perhaps so hard that it inhibits cross-cultural comparison for many people.
In my group discussion, we spoke about Millenials and why they have such a negative reputation. It's a fun topic, and I love talking to my friends about it. However, when the Polish students with whom we were corresponding began to contribute an unfamiliar set of facts and assumptions to the discussion, a great many of the "facts" about my own culture started to seem more contingent and open to question. Like Captain Kirk monologuing haltingly at a hyper-advanced alien race with no understanding of how the existences of such tiny people with such short life-spans could possibly be meaningful, I struggled to formulate what exactly was so important about and to us. Distracted by the enormity of the task, I entirely failed to remember that one of the other members of discussion had proposed that we discuss something less serious and that we had agreed to change the subject. As soon as someone else brought up Millenials again, I jumped right back into the topic we had all agreed to stop talking about. In other words, I committed just the kind of error that makes diplomacy such a headache - I correctly identified a social cue, then proceeded to ignore it at the first available opportunity.
My experience has left me wondering: could this be what happened to the students in the study? Could their inattention to detail have been the result of the cognitive overload caused by trying to consider their own cultures as an object of inquiry from an unfamiliar perspective? Or are we dealing with something much more mundane here, as I originally thought?
Excellent observations and questions, Anthony. I would guess that for some of the students in our 2004 study, they were simply undergrads who read superficially and didn't stop to reflect. But for anyone who has suddenly realized all that we take for granted, especially all of the assumptions that we have about our culture, and all that would have to be explained to someone not familiar with our culture, it is daunting and overwhelming. We all know that we can't possibly learn everything there is to know about the Polish culture in one short exchange, so the question is, what is possible in an online exchange like ours? Will it be possible only to talk about "less serious" topics? How we will approach meatier, interesting, controversial, culturally-laden topics?
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