Culture in the Blender

In my free time, I’ve been looking for more papers relating to the TCK experience. One of them, Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition, is arguing for a paradigm shift in how culture is viewed.

The effort to identify the knowledge that varies between but not within large cultural groups had led to the conceptualization of cultural knowledge in terms of very general constructs, such as individualistic as opposed to collectivist value orientations, which apply to all aspects of life (Segall et al 1998). With the emphasis on domain-general constructs has come the assumption that the influence of culture on cognition is continual and constant. Cultural knowledge is conceptualized to be like a contact lens that affects the individual’s perceptions of visual stimuli all of the time. This conception unfortunately leaves little room for a second internalized culture within an individual’s psychology. In sum, the methods and assumptions of cross-cultural psychology have not fostered the analysis of how individuals incorporate more than one culture.

I have read some of that type of studies, and I think Hong et al are right. The contact lens analogy is rather apt. Looking within myself, I know that I respond differently in different cultural situations. I am more American when I am in America, more Swedish when I’m in Sweden, more Finnish when I’m in Finland, and more Chinese when I’m in China. I answer questions differently in each cultural context. I know others do, too – my mother was very happy over a real leather (as opposed to plastic or fake leather) handbag she had found in 重庆 (Chóngqìng). I had just arrived from the States to visit, and she was showing me her fantastic, stylish purchase. I thought it were a little old-fashioned in design, for old ladies really, but wasn’t going to hurt her feelings by saying so. She can use whatever handbags she wants, it’s her choice. Later, after my parents had re-expatriated to the States, my mother told me that she had unpacked the handbag, looked at it, and then understood the weird look I apparently had had on my face when she was showing me the handbag in 重庆 (Chóngqìng). What looked good with a Chinese eye in China looked different with a Western eye in the States. I’ve had to discard clothes I’ve bought in China when I’ve looked at them in the West. They might have been fashionable, but in the West they signaled new things that I didn’t want to signal. Somehow, that didn’t occur to me when buying the clothes in China. If aesthetics aren’t preserved when you switch cultural contexts, why would everything else do so? If culture is like a contact lens, why can something as simple to examine as a handbag look different at different times when the culture mix in a person is the same?

This sort of thing has been documented in research on biculturalism (not surprisingly). This kind of change in perspective is called frame-switching in bicultural research and code-switching in nigriescence literature as well as Barbara Schaetti’s doctoral thesis on third culture kid identity (Schaetti, 2001). Code-switching isn’t very easy to explain if you think about cultures as contact lenses, but Hong et al argue that if you think about culture as a network of situation-specific knowledge, like a system of cultural knowledge, it’s easy to make sense of and understand. You can have several networks of knowledge telling you how to behave. Sometimes they might conflict on how you ought to behave in a specific situation, but just having more than one cultural meaning system isn’t hard to analyze. Hong et al write

A first premise is that a culture is not internalized in the form of an integrated and highly general structure, such that an overall mentality, worldview, or value orientation. Rather, culture is internalized in the form of a loose network of domain-specific structures, such as categories and implicit theories (Bruner, 1990; D’Andrade, 1984; Shore, 1996; Strauss, 1992). A second premise is that individuals can acquire more than one such cultural meaning system, even if these theories contain conflicting theories. That is, contradictory or conflicting constructs can simultaneously be posessed by an individual; they simply cannot simultaneously guide cognition. The key to this distinction is that posessing a particular construct does not entail relying on it continuously; only a small subset of the individual’s knowledge comes to the fore and guides the interpretation of a stimulus.

So how do you end up picking a culture to use? They’re saying that you use the cultural knowledge that comes to mind first in a particular situation.

A key concept is that the pieces of an individual’s knowledge may vary in accessibility (Higgins, 1996; Wyer & Srull, 1986). The more assessible a construct, the more likely it is to come to the fore in the individual’s mind and guide interpretation. But what determines whether a piece of knowledge is highly accessible? A long-standing hypothesis in cognitive and social psychology holds that a construct, such as a category, is accessibel to the extent that it has been activated by recent use (Brunner, 1957).

In other words, you tend to use whatever cultural ideas that you’ve been using recently. So even though I “ought” to have known better about the clothes, I didn’t, not because I had forgotten about the West but because the Chinese way of thinking came into mind the fastest, because I used it all the time.

In their study, Hong et al got Hong Kong Chinese to be more cooperative in the Prisoner’s Dilemma after seeing images like a dragon and 中 (zhōng, middle and the first character of ‘China’), 天安门 (Tiānānmén, the Gate of Heavenly Peace), and Confucius and less cooperative after seeing images like an American flag, the White House, and a portrait of Lincoln compared to a group that saw landscapes. The point is to show that people who know more than one culture tend to use the one they were reminded of last. They point out at the end of the paper that based on other previous research, language is probably such a reminder of culture.

This way of thinking about culture – in terms of networks of concepts – makes it easy to come up with a precise theory of how a third culture kid is different from not only people who have lived only in one country, but also from other cross-cultural people. I think that the difference lies in how those multiple networks get connected. Bicultural people might have cultural network A and cultural network B. (Yes, I know, it was very imaginative to name them that. I take full credit.) In some situations, they use network A, and in others, they use network B. There is an example of this related in the paper.

Consider, for example, the following experience of a Mexican American individual:
At home with my parents and grandparents the only acceptable language was Spanish; actually, it’s all they really understood. Everything was really Mexican, but at the same time they wanted me to speak good English… But at school, I felt really different because everyone was American, including me. Then I would go home in the afternoon and be Mexican again. (quoted in Padilla, 1994, p. 30)

Although I can’t speak for other third culture kids, that’s not at all what living in the third culture is like for me. In this example, it would be more like being frustrated that your parents don’t understand English and American culture and that people at school don’t understand Spanish and Mexican culture when you want to use those concepts. For me, my family has always been cross-cultural, since my parents aren’t from the same country, so going home and being a certain nationality has never even been possible for me the way it is for the Mexican-American quoted above. In fact, “home” to me connotes not having to remember which culture network a concept is part of originally. At home, I do as I like, using culture network A one minute, culture network B one minute, and culture network C after that. When I was living with my parents and when I see them now, I speak Finnish with my mother and switch to Swedish when my father comes into the room. We often listen to radio, TV, movies, and performances in other languages with no problems. Then when I went to school or go to work now, everything’s different because everyone and everything is from only one country, and so am I. Sort of. As soon as they encounter another language than their mother tongue, it causes tension, even when they speak it. They pay attention to ‘foreignness.’

I think third culture kids learn more than one culture network and then connect the two together into one to make a third culture network. I think the reason repatriation is so difficult is that we simply don’t know which parts of our third culture network of ideas came from which country, and because the concepts that were from that culture aren’t very assessible at all when you repatriate. I’m constantly discovering where some idea of mine belongs, because it’s just ‘been there’ until something makes me go through a fact of experience encounter. (An encounter where the fact that my experience has been different from others’.) I just construct what feels like a complete culture network from bits and pieces of culture networks from different countries. For example, I didn’t realize until I was around 18 that Americans are very uncomfortable with being naked, even in their families. I reasoned as follows: I know American culture. I’ve been naked around my family since I was born and have never heard of anyone who wasn’t. Therefore, Americans are comfortable with nudity. The fallacy lies in that I had never been in a situation where Americans’ discomfort with nudity came up, and so I didn’t know that that wasn’t part of an American culture network.

Adults who expatriate might make similar mistakes. The difference is that they started with only one culture network developed and are aware of that. When you build your first culture network and it includes more than one culture, you can never ‘switch’ completely between cultures like an immigrant. You can’t help but rely on a little of this way of thinking and on a little of that way of thinking. This might be what gives rise to the basic features of third culture kids that Pollock & van Reken have found. (Pollock & van Reken, 2001) I think this constructivist approach to thinking about culture and being part of more than one culture is a very good way to go about explaining what is different about people who are multicultural. It resonates well with my experiences, it ties in with research on both bilingual people (Kanno, 2000) and third culture kids (Pollock & van Reken, 2001). I hope someone in that field sees the connection.

References:

Bruner, J. S. (1957) Going beyond the information given. In University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Psychology (Ed.), Contemporary approaches to cognition (pp. 218-238). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In Hong et al, 2000.

Higgins, E. T. (1996) Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicabilit, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. E. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of base principles (pp. 133-168.) New York: Guilford Press. In Hong et al 2000.

Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000) Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition. American Psychologist, 55(7), 709-720.

Kanno, Y. (2000). Bilingualism and Identity: The Stories of Japanese Returnees. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 3(1), 1-18.

Padilla, A. M. (1994) Bicultural development: A theoretical and empirical examination. In R. G. Malgady & O. Rodriguez (Eds.) Theoreticaland conceptual issues in Hispanic mental health (pp.20-51). Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Pollock, D. C., & van Reken, R. E. (2001). Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc.

Schaetti, B. F. (2001). Global Nomad Identity: Hypothesizing a Developmental Model (Doctoral dissertation, The Union Institute, 2001.) Dissertation Abstracts, 9992721

Segall, M. H., Lonner, W. J., & Berry, J. W. (1998) Cross-cultural psychology as a scholarly discipline: On the flowering of culture in behavioral research. American Psychologist, 53, 1101-1110. (In Hong et at 2000)

Wyer, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (1986) Sociopolitical change and percieved vitality. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10, 459-469.