In the last video, we introduced one of the most important concepts you should take away from this class, the concept of methodological cultural relativity. At the very end, we also mentioned, briefly, the idea of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, remember, means judging another cultural element from your own point of view, from your own frame of reference. That is, from your own culturally acquired way of understanding and reasoning about the world. While we're talking about ethnocentrism and the uses of methodological cultural relativism, and isolating and analyzing cultural boundaries that cause problems. It is important also to avoid stereotyping. Stereotyping means assuming that some general, or even specific but highly distinctive trait, found in a group or team applies equally to everyone in the group. For example, as regards our Brazilian friend who felt she had gotten ugly, when she went to graduate school at Stanford University, we'd be a mistake to assume that there are no men in Stanford, who are demonstrative in their appreciation of women. Sure there are. Similarly it would be a mistake to assume that all men in Rio are demonstrative. When we make that kind of generalization we engage in stereotyping. Because cultural elements are socially acquired their prevalence in a population is usually a matter of statistical frequencies. Not everyone on a team acquires all of the team's culture. And they may not acquire it in exactly the same way. One team member may learn it just a little differently than another. For example the popular American rapper Kanye West is seen as someone who never smiles. West himself claims his non smiling is culturally acquired. His serious demeanor he says, came from looking at pictures in a book from the 1800's. In the online Lifestyle News site, high-snobiety as in society mixed together with snob, high snobeity. He also stated, when you see paintings in an old castle, people are not smiling because it just wouldn't look as cool. It could be of course that he is in the forefront of a new trend. And that 20 years from now, Americans will not be smiling. It won't be cool to smile. When I lived in Menlo Park, California one year. I frequented a bicycle shop in order to keep my old bike in good repair. I had to because I rode it every day five miles to my office. The shop was staffed by three guys. Maybe in their mid twenties or so. Could be late twenties. I was struck by the fact that none of them ever smiled, and I mean ever, even if I tried to say something that at least I thought was amusing. There seemed to be a veritable culture of non-smiling within the shop. They were all Americans, no question about that. Similarly, when we talk about the cultural orientation against firing employees in Japan, be wrong to imagine that all the Japanese companies are like in this regard. NAC, the huge Japanese electronics corporation for example, announced in 2012 that it would lay off 10,000, 7,000 of them in Japan. In 2015, the Toshiba corporation also announced 10,000 layoffs. A New York Times article from December 21, 2015 notes. Shedding workers is expensive in Japan. Where the majority of employees enjoy legal protection from layoffs. Toshiba will have to negotiate voluntary buyouts instead. But again this is a caution against stereotyping Japan as a place where every corporation equally conforms to the cultural prohibition on firing. A good way to counteract the tendency to culturally stereotype is this. When you are thinking about a particular aspect of culture found in a group. Conjure in your mind a normal distribution or bell curve from statistics, as in this diagram. You can think of it specifically, say, in terms of smiling. Imagine that the horizontal axis of the curve represents the number of smiles per day for a given individual. And the vertical axis, the number of individuals who actually smile that many times in the day. The mean would represent what is typical of the population. To think about the relationship between two populations, say, the US and Russia, in the case of smiling, imagine two such curves with different means. Yes the means are different but there is considerable overlap in the range.
