Culture in the Blender

Today’s fun fact about culture and psychology: If you have a high need for closure, you are more likely to make culturally typical decisions. Conversely, if you have a low need for closure, you are more likely to make a culturally atypical decision, like attribute agency to a group if you’re North American or attribute agency to an individual if you’re East Asian. This muddles knowing which culture what behavior came from for third culture kids even further than I thought - I evidently have a low need for closure. (I. e. I am comfortable with uncertainty and don’t need to feel like I am following the “rules”.) The question is, do I have a low need for closure because that’s what life teaches you as a third culture kid or did I become a third culture kid because my personality was such that I have a low need for closure? Is that why some expats don’t adjust almost at all, despite the (to me) obvious inconveniences? It’s a testable hypothesis. I wonder if someone’s already done it.

Apprently, being under pressure also makes you more likely to make a culturally typical decision. That’s useful information, both about yourself and about others. Asking people to step out of a particular culture box is harder when they’re stressed out. Ironically, I guess this means expats will have the most trouble learning a new culture when they’ve just moved and they’re still sorting out where to buy groceries and when the furniture might be arriving.

I wonder if we can ever know whether a third culture kid is making a culturally typical decision according to some culture of theirs or just thinking out of the box. Perhaps one of the commonalities we have in psychological terms is low need for closure, which goes hand in hand with the third culture network cross-linking I wrote about earlier. Maybe we just plain don’t care whether others from some particular culture would make the same choice or not.