Cultural Bias In Communication

I’m reading this great book at the moment, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and one of the concepts it talks about is how much cultural norms effect the way that we interact with each other. The concept is discussed in terms of air traffic crashes and how the way that people interact, specifically in this case the pilot and co-pilots, can have such a massive impact on what happens, in this case a plane crash. Cultural norms, being cultural bias in communication.

Gladwell is talking about distance, or, another way of thinking of it is rank. As in, if that person has more status than me then it will effect the way I communicate with them; how deferential I am. I’m unlikely to be honest and up front with someone that I feel has more social standing than me. Meaning, in the case of the pilots, those from countries with greater distance are unlikely to tell the pilot “hey, dude, you’re doing in wrong” in the case of an emergency.

This is a concept I have enormous difficulty getting my head around. I cannot imagine anyone sitting there while the plane is going down keeping their thoughts and ideas to themselves rather than speak up in the loudest voice possible.

And that’s because of where I’m from. This distance bias has been measured across countries around the world and the lowest distance, meaning smallest consideration in communication given to perceived status, is found in people from New Zealand (where I’m from), Australia (where I currently live), South Africa, Ireland and United States.

The countries with the highest bias are Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico and the Philippines. The rest of the world falls somewhere in between.

I believe that all people are equal. There’s no qualifier there. All people are equal. I’m not better or worse than anyone. We all just are. And I struggle to deal with bias in others. It shows up in so many ways. In my opinion here in Australia the bias tends to be less about social standing and more about success. Wealth, business acumen, sporting prowess, being sexy and hot are all things that are respected and considered ‘better’ (guess which one women usually achieve).

I don’t see an issue with celebrating success, except in the category of this person happens to look a certain way, because that’s corrosive, but I do have issue with the feeling of superiority it seems to generate. It shows up in small things like those with big, expensive cars thinking they should have right of way, regardless of the actual law, or good looking people cheating on their partners, or intellectually gifted people looking down their noses at those less gifted.

But most prevalent is the classic one; ‘better’ looking people, ie, thinner people, are more important than those who aren’t. It’s cultural bias all the same and needs to be mitigated any way it can be.

How do you do that though? Change a cultural bias?

The way they did it at Korean Airlines, to overcome the cultural bias of distance in the cockpit, was to change the way the pilots and co-pilots think. They taught them to communicate in English. The idea being if they had to think in a language other than their native language they would then also approach the status issue differently; while they were working that is. It worked remarkable well and Korean Airlines went from having an appalling crash record into one of the safest airlines in the world. It’s very impressive.

Look at me, admiring success. How Australian of me.