Hardwiring culture

"Our inability to understand intuitively the actions and gestures of people from other cultures is hardwired into our brains" is how the Financial Times describes the conclusions reached by researchers from the University of California into the "mirror neuron network" (FT is subscription only, so here's a free access article from Science Daily which covers the same press release), a set of nerve cells that fire not only when we perform an action but also when we watch someone else performing the same action.  Apparently the mirror neuron network responded differently when subjects watched gestures being made by someone from their own culture and someone from a foreign culture.

"Culture has a measurable influence on our brain and as a result on our behaviour", says  Istvan Molnar- Szakacs, a member of the team.

Which comes as something of a relief to those of us who make a living from explaining cultural differences and have to defend ourselves from time to time from people who hate anything that smacks of cultural determinism and say things like "I don't sense any cultural differences.  We are all human beings.  You just need to be sensitive to others and polite" etc.  Not that I disagree with these statements, and sometimes I find myself saying similar things when people get too wound up about etiquette.

In another sense it is bad news for us, because it may also mean that it is very hard to train someone to understand the gestures and feelings of a person from another culture or to use gestures which will be correctly interpreted by someone from another culture.

Comments

[Tom Freeman]

I've just looked at the abstract and it's very interesting, thanks for pointing this out. The difference between the two actors being watched was visibly ethnic but not visibly 'cultural', suggesting that ethnicity is a key factor in empathy.

The other interesting thing was that there was more mirror neuron activity when the Nicaraguan actor made Nicaraguan gestures than when he made American gestures.

"The latter result cannot be interpreted simply as an effect of ethnic ingroup familiarity. Thus, a likely explanation of these findings is that motor resonance is modulated by interacting biological and cultural factors."

In other words, it's easier for us to relate to ethnically different people when they act differently from people we know in our own ethnic group. We (or at least part of our brains) seem to assume that ethnicity is partly determinative of cluture/behaviour.

Alas.

[Pernille]

Thanks for the additional explanations of the research findings. They make me understand why Japanese people have found it a bit "kimochi waruii" (feel funny or bad) when I behave in a Japanese way. Once I was dressed in a yukata (Japanese cotton kimono) and pouring beer for a Japanese guy and he did a double take and said "I thought you were Japanese for a moment" but he did not mean this in a nice way, and looked rather perturbed. I also find it weird when non-Japanese do things like put their hands in front of their mouth when they laugh, as Japanese women do, or bow on the telephone.

[Tom Freeman]

Bowing on the telephone? I would never have imagined that.

Last time I was in Paris, I tried to act in a French manner, and it seemed to go down badly. Then again, what I was doing was trying to speak French...