How much woe when you go: How to calculate your culture shock
In a piece of research released twelve years ago and seemingly immediately forgotten, Lawrence R. Zeitlin at City University of New York wrote a report on how to estimate the severity of culture shock. By using measurements of common cultural values taken from a business study of over 160.000 employees in 53 different countries, he extracted a value representing the cultural distance between two countries. This value again, can be used to measure the amount of culture shock that should be expected when cultures meet.
The fundamental theoretical point of view is summed up in one paragraph in Zeitlin’s paper:
We spend a lifetime learning what to expect from others and what others expect from us. We strive to meet the demands of our society and our culture. Other cultures make different demands and other people have different expectations. Culture shock may be defined as the confusion and discomfort caused by the conflict in perceived motives and expected behaviors between the home culture and the foreign culture. Individuals within all cultures have unique and idiosyncratic personalities which are often a source of misunderstanding. Cultural values, however, are common to almost everyone in a given culture and establish a general theme of behavior.
The study the measurements come from is by Geert Hofstede (1983), and is a major study of comparative research on cultural differences. It’s worth noting that this study is based on employees from one multinational corporation, which means that the respondents are typically employed, middle class individuals. However, the relative differences between countries should not be affected by that, and furthermore, the middle class is what one will most likely run into.
This study identified four dimension to categorize national cultures by:
- Individualism/Collectivism
- Power distance (acceptance of difference in individual power)
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Masculinity/Femininity
Now Zeitlin re-analyzed these data, and found the three first dimensions to be co-varying enough to be regarded as one dimension - namely Authoritarianism. This simpler, two-dimensional model allows for a visual presentation of which countries are similar and which one are different - and this is quite interesting:
Most of the abbreviations should be self-explanatory. IRA is Iran, AUL is Australia, What looks like “GEP” is Germany.
NOTE: Judging from the data in the report, the axes on this graph may be a bit confusing: Further to the right means more authoritarianism, up and down indicates gender differentiation.
A lot of things stand out here. One is, as Zeitlin also observes, that Japan is completely on it’s own - and is the one country that is the furthest from any one other country, and is also the country which has the furthest distance from another country (Sweden). It’s also fascinating to see how close the anglo-saxon group is - far more than the Scandinavian countries, which are often seen as quite unitary culturally. Another curiosity is that the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands alone occupy the left/bottom quadrant, the low gender difference/non-authoritarian corner.
Note that the “Gender difference” dimension is made up of attitudes towards “machismo”-values such as aggressiveness, assertiveness and achievement - it is not only cultural differentiation on gender.
Now according to Zeitlin, the distance between two countries are a indicator of how large the culture shock will be for an individual when moving between the two. The report goes in to a lot more detail on this - of course - and provides more approaches to calculating the distance in different ways, among others taking all four original dimensions into account.
There is a lot of potential problems with this, but the approach is really interesting. In his introduction, Zeitlin disregards personality differences without any good justification - only that cultural values are fairly universal within the culture and that personality differences are less important. However, an approach that actually takes into account individual differences in personality would be more refined, maybe even more predictive. Another issue is whether all cultural differences are equally aversive - some expressions may be appreciable for all - perhaps the high-authoritarianism Austrians, who otherwise are similar, would find the more relaxed Scandinavians unproblematic. And perhaps the gender differentiation is a bigger problem when going in one direction than the other. But that is just speculation.
It is questionable whether this would predict culture shock. It appears as it could predict difficulty with integration, rather than the immediate shock of entry into a new culture. For example, it does not explain the phenomenon of reverse culture shock, which shouldn’t really exist in this model. That does not mean it is not interesting, however, just that the calculation may be a bit more complex.
The report is available here at the wee price of US 32:
Zeitlin, L, (1996). How much woe when we go: A quantitative method for predicting culture shock. International Journal of Stress Management, 3 (2), 85-98.
If that’s a bit too much, here are some personal stories of culture shock from blogs: How to burn grilled cheese every time (Culture Shock), My first day at UNI! (Mathawaada), Burkina Faso: Level four culture shock (Global Voices)
But it is what I am experiencing right now in India! I will be home to Norway in a little over a week…no more burned grilled cheese!
