So this is where we'll end.
If we could start at the beginning.
(Laughter)
This is the last slide.
Thank you, Carlos.
A shout-out from Sanchez to Carlos.
I would like to take you on an adventure in the next 18 minutes
to a place far, far away - at least from here -
and tell you about the strange customs of people in this land, America.
Before we embark, though, you might want to look at the sea.
In some ways, I think in a way,
oceans are like the cultural diversity of the people that inhabit their shores.
They're from the Pacific to the Indian; they share a great deal in common.
And yet if you look at the underlying differences,
they're very subtle but very powerful:
the movements of their currents,
the variation in their tides.
Very important differences you need to understand
if you want to navigate across them.
The cultural difference I'd like to share with you today
has to do with relational mindfulness,
which is basically how attentive you are,
how attuned you are,
to the social-emotional context of the situation.
Now, the adventure is inspired by a Frenchman and a German,
and whenever those two groups have any agreement,
it's worth investigating further, yeah?
(Laughter)
Both had remarked
that Americans have a sort of strange way
of approaching interpersonal relationships at work.
In fact, Tocqueville called it "American exceptionalism."
And what they were talking about
is how American have this ability to not notice or place very little weight
on emotions and interpersonal relationships
in their dealings in business.
Now, Weber pinned it on the people who founded the culture in the 1600s,
these Calvinist purists who had this sort of feeling
that it was immoral to be mindful to emotions or relationships
while performing God's work,
which is your daily work, essentially, on that.
So it seemed very interesting to do an experiment.
As a social psychologist, this is what we do.
We take old ideas and sort of rehash them again.
What I did was I put people in the lab.
These were undergraduates, and so I came prepared.
I bought them business suits, shirts anyway,
clip-on ties so they wouldn't feel bad,
and tried to create them into this work mindset.
I wanted to see,
Is it true that this sort of relational mindlessness
occurs in work situations more than non-work situations,
at least for Americans?
I put them in these business shirts, got them to do a Harvard Business case.
It was actually easy to put them into a business mindset.
And this other group, I had to create a more casual non-work situation.
Now, I'm from Los Angeles,
but living in Michigan,
it's very clear that it's hard to be in a very sort of relaxed, warm mindset.
So in the middle of a Michigan winter,
I ordered from Hawaii these Hawaiian t-shirts,
had them play some card games.
I must tell you, as an experimentalist,
it's extremely difficult to get people relaxed in the lab.
I think most experiments, by definition,
replicate how we think and how we behave at work:
you show up for an appointment,
given some instructions, some compensation, maybe,
or some peanuts, whatever.
We put them into these two different mindsets.
Then what we did next is we played over the speakers some words,
and the words were emotionally laden,
like happy, funeral, sad, wedding.
And if you know the spoken word, there's always two channels:
there's what is said and how it is said.
So you can say "happy" sad.
And if I were to ask you, "Quickly, tell me, is the meaning of the word -
ignore the tone of the voice -
positive or negative?"
it's no problem.
But if I say "happy" sad,
sometimes it takes a bit longer to make that decision
unless you're not paying attention to the emotions of the spoken voice.
Using this paradigm,
we found that people in Hawaiian t-shirts -
it's a very difficult task.
"I can't ignore the emotional tone of your voice."
Put them in business shirts,
have them do a Harvard Business case,
it's as if it was perfectly consistent -
completely able to ignore the emotional tone of voice.
In a sense, there are two dimensions of most situations at work
that you can be mindful to.
Mindfulness is a big umbrella.
We'll hear some great talks on this coming up,
but you can be attentive to "the paper and the people,"
the task and the relationships.
And this idea appears to be
that Americans are able to be mindful to the task
but not to the social context.
That's the idea.
So, for example,
if you play audio recordings or show movies of work groups
and you test people's memory later -
here I have a contrast between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans -
you find that both are highly attentive to the task.
Both are paying attention - that makes sense, that's what's going on.
You test their memory for the relational component -
whether people got along, they trusted one another -
it's as if it fell on deaf ears.
It's as if the Americans have such an effective filter
for blocking out stuff in the social-emotional domain.
You know, in cross-cultural communications, we heard before,
often a way in which you're able to save face,
for yourself or another person,
is you convey the news accurately but indirectly.
You may say, "I like you. I'm just not in like with you,"
or these sorts of things.
You're indirect.
As sort of the classic story in cross-cultural research
is that Asians are indirect and Americans are direct.
Well, as theory suggests, it's not that simple.
It's not as if Americans are one way all the time;
it really depends on work.
So what we did is we tested their level of indirectness:
how much they attend to indirect cues inside and outside the work place.
Or to put it another way,
with a friend they don't work with versus a co-worker.
Look at what you find.
Essentially,
Americans become very direct in the workplace,
whereas you find in these two East Asian contexts,
they go in the exact opposite direction.
The punchline is profound.
It suggests that cultural divides grow wider in the context of work.
That's problematic because, to be honest,
when we're not at work, we interact with who we want to.
But at work, we're forced to interact with all those other people -
with very different styles.
It's problematic if you interact with an American
and you want to save face and get the point across.
In another sort of study, we looked at how they feel about conflict.
There is only one finding in my field that is like Newton's Law:
it's true all of the time.
And that is when a team experiences relationship conflict,
their performance suffers.
Your mother could've told you this,
but they did all of the research and verified it's true.
Building on this research, we tried to test this idea
that maybe Americans don't believe that finding.
Maybe they think - they're very optimistic -
that "Well, maybe if we hate each other,
it won't be pleasant, but we can still perform well.
Now, if you ask them,
"Do you agree that conflict hurts performance?"
their attitude depends
on whether it's about the relational domain or the task.
If it's about the task, you find no real cultural difference;
everyone seems to agree, yes, it will harm performance.
But conflict in the relational domain, as shown on the bars on the right,
Americans are much more on the fence, they're like, "I'm just not sure."
Now, mind you, they're actually wrong,
and most of the data that proves relationship conflict harms performance
actually comes from American data.
(Laughter)
Groups that provided the finding are least likely to believe it.
When we first tried to publish this,
reviewers were very upset because it seemed anti-American,
so rather than call it a bias, we said, "They're very optimistic."
Now, they loved it. It won awards. It was great.
Think of it as optimistic.
Imagine you have two cultural groups
and there's an opportunity to engage in business with someone.
If you're the sort that believes that conflict, if you don't get along,
the deal won't come through,
you probably won't engage in business with that person.
But what if you're wrong?
Americans are more likely to take the chance
of doing business with somebody that they might end up hating,
and that opens up a number of opportunities.
The problem happens when you have a team
in which you have diversity in beliefs about this.
Imagine you get into a situation where there's conflict,
and you have one person who says, "Look, we're not getting along.
We have to stop and resolve this, or we're not going to be able to succeed."
Then the American says,
"Let bygones be bygones. We don't need to deal with it."
And the other person says, "No, we need to deal with it; it's important."
"Let it go."
"I can't let it go."
And now they're having meta-conflict, a conflict about conflict.
This is exactly what we're finding
in a team of over 100 London Business School MBAs.
You have conflict about conflict.
The idea is the diversity and beliefs about a cultural phenomena or conflict
can actually create its own dynamics, above and beyond what you normally expect.
It also happens at a very unconscious level.
We've done research on nonconscious mimicry.
Our earlier speaker was talking about
how people have this natural tendency to engage in mimicry.
You've seen this at a coffee shop,
maybe the oldest one in the world,
where one person leans forward, the other leans forward;
one person crosses their leg, the other crosses their leg.
This happens in many species; it happens in humans.
It builds rapport.
When you're in sync with somebody, you feel that you click -
that's sort of this one expression.
But not all the time do you sync with people.
You have to actually pay attention to them.
In fact, what we found in research is that in work situations,
Americans are less likely to look like this,
where they're mirroring one another,
and more likely to look like this.
They're not attending to the other person,
and therefore,
they don't even automatically, unconsciously mirror the other person.
Well, that may be fine,
but what happens then is it creates an awkwardness in the situation,
and imagine this parable,
which we did with a study.
We went to a corporation, we had a lab set up in their office,
and we had somebody, the person on the left,
either mirror or not mirror the other person.
Well, when the candidate, or the employee, was an American,
it didn't matter whether they were mirrored or not,
because they weren't paying attention.
(Laughter)
But when you put another cultural group,
a group that's actually relationally mindful, in there,
they became quite nervous, quite anxious when the other person didn't mirror them.
In fact, when we showed videotapes of just them to corporate recruiters,
they were deemed as not performing very well.
So those people are less likely to get hired.
Now, imagine you have an American who is very concerned about diversity
but has this cultural way about approaching work.
Those groups that are more relationally attuned
are going to perform worse, won't get the job.
It'll look like discrimination - perhaps you can call it that -
but it has nothing to do with racial or ethnic bias;
it has everything to do with two cultures coming together.
So this relational mindfulness is important for many reasons
that go beyond just the individual's well-being.
You can get incomplete social demographic patterns
in the workplace
just due to this subtle difference
in how attentive we are to the relational side of the situation.
People, in a sense, have the natural capacity
to pick up the local frequency of the context.
They just don't know
when their volume's turned down so low they can't hear the signal anymore.
Fortunately, there's some cross-cultural training.
We've been able to show, very easy,
with about a one-hour manipulation, or intervention, I should say.
(Laughter)
What's the difference?
(Laughter)
Talk to my marketing friends.
With a small intervention, you can say,
"Look, basically what's happened" -
and you put them through these demonstrations -
"your volume's been turned down, and you didn't even know it."
It's like automatic volume control.
And it's a real eye-opener.
Actually, if you do training with people who work with Americans,
a lot of progress can be made.
If you're going to try to bridge cultures,
you have to understand these subtle differences
that go beyond just main-effect characteristics or norms and values,
that look at the schemas, the mental maps people bring into the situation.
That's the only way you can possibly bridge cultural divides.
The most fascinating thing of all of this research we find
is it's not just that one culture's like x,
the other culture is y -
is the Americans are truly exceptional in good and bad ways.
They're an anomaly, unlike people in Europe.
So once you know something about the Americans,
then you know everything
about how they're going to have problems with every other culture.
Even though there's a lot of cultural diversity,
most cultures are highly attentive or remain highly attentive
to the relational context;
they're relationally mindful.
It's the Americans who have this unconscious ability
to turn down the volume in that context.
Thank you.
(Applause)