Cultural exceptionalism in relational mindfulness | Jefferey Sanchez-Burks | TEDxNUS

Dr. Jefferey Sanchez-Burks conducts research on how culture shapes how we think and act in cross-cultural situations. Recently, he's published work on creativity and emotional aperture. He takes us on a journey that explains the dynamics of American work culture and the relationship mindset, with a special focus on interpersonal relations. Through various anecdotes filled with humor and insight, one understands the American psyche.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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)