I use this technique sometimes (my lead-in phrase is the deliberately silly “Among my people...”), but it has a couple of flaws that force me to be careful with it.
Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you’re describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you’re talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. When you say, “In my culture, we put peanut butter on bread”, then you are also saying “in your culture, you do not put peanut butter on bread”. At the very most you are asking a question: “does your culture also put peanut butter on bread?” So, do not ever say something like “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” unless you also intend to say “Your culture punishes the innocent”—that is, unless you intend to start a fight.
Relatedly, you have to explicitly do the work of separating real cultural practices from aspirational ones—this framing will not help you. When you write “In my culture we do not punish the innocent”, probably you are thinking something like “In my culture, we think it’s important not to punish the innocent”, since mistakes do still happen from time to time. But statements like “In my culture we put peanut butter on bread” do not require this kind of aggressive interpretation, they can just be taken literally, so your listeners might reasonably take “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” as a (false) statement of literal fact. Clear and open communication is unlikely to follow.
(If you feel like you grasp these points and agree with them, here’s an exercise: can the section of the OP that starts “In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is.” be productively rewritten, and if so how?)
Overall, although I do like this technique and use it from time to time, I don’t think it’s well-suited to important topics. For similar reasons it’s easy to use in bad faith. That’s why I present it in such a silly and sociological (instead of formally diplomatic) way.
Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you’re describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you’re talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. [...] So, do not ever say something like “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” unless you also intend to say “Your culture punishes the innocent”—that is, unless you intend to start a fight.
Does this also apply to your own personal culture (whether aspiring or as-is), or “just” the broader context culture?
Because in my (aspiring) culture simple statements of fact are generally interpreted at face value and further evidence is required to make less charitable interpretations. This is especially true for interpretations that assume the speaker has made some kind of judgement.
So, let’s go meta here and see whether I intended to say “Your culture generally makes less charitable interpretations of statements than mine.” I guess the answer is yes, though I would like to point out the distinction here between personal culture and broader context culture, hence my question at the beginning. [Writing this I’m also realizing it’s really difficult to disentangle statements about culture from judgments. I’m noticing cognitive dissonance because I actually do think my culture is better, but I don’t like myself being judgmental.]
Now why did I write the comment above? Because in my culture-as-is the language used in the OP (“always”, “do not ever”) is too strong given my epistemic status.
Again, we can analyze the intent of this “In my culture”-statement. Here my intent is to say “your culture uses language differently from mine” OR “My epistemic status is different from yours.”
Not a direct response to your comment, but related and gives background to my initial question: In my aspiring culture a straightforward question (whatever that means) is by default meant and interpreted (primarily) as an expression of genuine curiosity about the answer.
Thinking about and writing this comment, I’ve realized that my own culture may be a lot more idiosyncratic than I thought. I also found it really interesting to see my initial prompt to write this post (an immediate gut reaction of “I don’t agree with that”) dissolve into an understanding of how the disagreement can be due to either cultural or epistemic differences.
NB: There is some entanglement here between intentions, interpretations and responses. In describing a “perfect” culture intentions and interpretations can be freely interchanged to a large extent because if everyone has the same culture they will make the correct assumptions about other people’s intents and states of mind. So saying “In my culture people say X because they want Y” is equivalent to saying “In my culture when someone says X people know that that person wants Y”. And then there is to an extent a disconnect between the epistemic status of your interpretation of the other person’s state of mind and your own reaction, because different reactions entail different costs. Even if an uncharitable interpretation has the highest probability of being correct it often makes sense to act under the assumption that a more charitable interpretation is correct.
Does this also apply to your own personal culture (whether aspiring or as-is), or “just” the broader context culture?
We’re talking about a tool for communicating with many different people with many different cultures, and with people whose cultures you don’t necessarily know very much about. So the bit you quoted isn’t just making claims about my culture, or even one of the (many) broader context cultures, it’s making claims about the correct prior over all such cultures.
But what claims exactly? I intended these two:
When you say, “In my culture X”, you’re also saying “In your culture plausibly not X”.
For some values of X, this will start fights (or hurt feelings, or sow mistrust, or have other effects you likely don’t want).
It seems like you came to agree with point #1, so I won’t belabor it further—let me know if I misread you and we can circle back. For point #2, I definitely agree that, the more charity the listener extends to you, the smaller the set of hurtful Xs is. But if you rely on that, you’re limiting the scope of this method to people who’ll apply that charity and whom you know will apply that charity. I picked “punishing the innocent” for my example value of X because I expect it to be broadly cross-cultural: if you go find 100 random people and ask them whether they punish the innocent, I expect that most of them will take offense. If you also expect that, you should build that expectation into your communication strategy, regardless of what your own culture would have you do in those kinds of situations.
Now, the better your know the person you’re talking to, the less important these warnings are. Then again, the better you know the person you’re talking to, the less you need the safety of the diplomatic/sociological frame, you can just discuss your values directly. That’s why I feel comfortable using all that highly absolutist “always/never” language above; it’s the same impulse that says “it’s always better to bet that a die will roll odd than that it’ll roll a 1, all else held equal”.
Thinking about it more, I suspect the real rule is that this method shouldn’t be used to talk about cultural values at all, just cultural practices—things that have little or no moral valence. That phrasing doesn’t quite capture the distinction I want—the Thai businessman who won’t shake hands with you doesn’t think his choice is arbitrary, after all—but it’s close. Another rule might be “don’t use these statements to pass moral judgement”, but that’s hard to apply; as you saw it can be difficult to notice that you’re doing it until after the fact.
Oooooh, I like this a lot. In particular, this resolves for me a bit of tension about why I liked the above comment and also disagreed with it—you’ve helped me split those reactions out into two different buckets. Seems relevant to common-knowledge-type stacks as well.
Strong appreciation for this comment/strong endorsement of the warnings it provides. However, I do nevertheless continue to think it’s well-suited to important topics, having seen it productively used on important topics in my own experience.
“Important” was not the right word, I agree; I took a slightly better stab at it in the last paragraph of my reply to ZeitPolizei upthread. Vocabulary aside, would you agree that there’s a class of cultural values that this framing doesn’t help you talk about?
I want to think further and also want to answer you now, so: knee-jerk response without too much thought is something like “there’s a class of cultural values that this framing is insufficient to help you talk about, but it feels to me like a piece of the puzzle that lets you bridge the gap.”
i.e. I agree there are ways this can be counterproductive for whole categories of important communication. But I’d probably route through this thing anyway, given my current state of knowledge?
Would not be surprised to find myself talked out of this viewpoint.
I use this technique sometimes (my lead-in phrase is the deliberately silly “Among my people...”), but it has a couple of flaws that force me to be careful with it.
Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you’re describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you’re talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. When you say, “In my culture, we put peanut butter on bread”, then you are also saying “in your culture, you do not put peanut butter on bread”. At the very most you are asking a question: “does your culture also put peanut butter on bread?” So, do not ever say something like “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” unless you also intend to say “Your culture punishes the innocent”—that is, unless you intend to start a fight.
Relatedly, you have to explicitly do the work of separating real cultural practices from aspirational ones—this framing will not help you. When you write “In my culture we do not punish the innocent”, probably you are thinking something like “In my culture, we think it’s important not to punish the innocent”, since mistakes do still happen from time to time. But statements like “In my culture we put peanut butter on bread” do not require this kind of aggressive interpretation, they can just be taken literally, so your listeners might reasonably take “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” as a (false) statement of literal fact. Clear and open communication is unlikely to follow.
(If you feel like you grasp these points and agree with them, here’s an exercise: can the section of the OP that starts “In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is.” be productively rewritten, and if so how?)
Overall, although I do like this technique and use it from time to time, I don’t think it’s well-suited to important topics. For similar reasons it’s easy to use in bad faith. That’s why I present it in such a silly and sociological (instead of formally diplomatic) way.
Does this also apply to your own personal culture (whether aspiring or as-is), or “just” the broader context culture?
Because in my (aspiring) culture simple statements of fact are generally interpreted at face value and further evidence is required to make less charitable interpretations. This is especially true for interpretations that assume the speaker has made some kind of judgement.
So, let’s go meta here and see whether I intended to say “Your culture generally makes less charitable interpretations of statements than mine.” I guess the answer is yes, though I would like to point out the distinction here between personal culture and broader context culture, hence my question at the beginning. [Writing this I’m also realizing it’s really difficult to disentangle statements about culture from judgments. I’m noticing cognitive dissonance because I actually do think my culture is better, but I don’t like myself being judgmental.]
Now why did I write the comment above? Because in my culture-as-is the language used in the OP (“always”, “do not ever”) is too strong given my epistemic status.
Again, we can analyze the intent of this “In my culture”-statement. Here my intent is to say “your culture uses language differently from mine” OR “My epistemic status is different from yours.”
Not a direct response to your comment, but related and gives background to my initial question: In my aspiring culture a straightforward question (whatever that means) is by default meant and interpreted (primarily) as an expression of genuine curiosity about the answer.
Thinking about and writing this comment, I’ve realized that my own culture may be a lot more idiosyncratic than I thought. I also found it really interesting to see my initial prompt to write this post (an immediate gut reaction of “I don’t agree with that”) dissolve into an understanding of how the disagreement can be due to either cultural or epistemic differences.
NB: There is some entanglement here between intentions, interpretations and responses. In describing a “perfect” culture intentions and interpretations can be freely interchanged to a large extent because if everyone has the same culture they will make the correct assumptions about other people’s intents and states of mind. So saying “In my culture people say X because they want Y” is equivalent to saying “In my culture when someone says X people know that that person wants Y”. And then there is to an extent a disconnect between the epistemic status of your interpretation of the other person’s state of mind and your own reaction, because different reactions entail different costs. Even if an uncharitable interpretation has the highest probability of being correct it often makes sense to act under the assumption that a more charitable interpretation is correct.
We’re talking about a tool for communicating with many different people with many different cultures, and with people whose cultures you don’t necessarily know very much about. So the bit you quoted isn’t just making claims about my culture, or even one of the (many) broader context cultures, it’s making claims about the correct prior over all such cultures.
But what claims exactly? I intended these two:
When you say, “In my culture X”, you’re also saying “In your culture plausibly not X”.
For some values of X, this will start fights (or hurt feelings, or sow mistrust, or have other effects you likely don’t want).
It seems like you came to agree with point #1, so I won’t belabor it further—let me know if I misread you and we can circle back. For point #2, I definitely agree that, the more charity the listener extends to you, the smaller the set of hurtful Xs is. But if you rely on that, you’re limiting the scope of this method to people who’ll apply that charity and whom you know will apply that charity. I picked “punishing the innocent” for my example value of X because I expect it to be broadly cross-cultural: if you go find 100 random people and ask them whether they punish the innocent, I expect that most of them will take offense. If you also expect that, you should build that expectation into your communication strategy, regardless of what your own culture would have you do in those kinds of situations.
Now, the better your know the person you’re talking to, the less important these warnings are. Then again, the better you know the person you’re talking to, the less you need the safety of the diplomatic/sociological frame, you can just discuss your values directly. That’s why I feel comfortable using all that highly absolutist “always/never” language above; it’s the same impulse that says “it’s always better to bet that a die will roll odd than that it’ll roll a 1, all else held equal”.
Thinking about it more, I suspect the real rule is that this method shouldn’t be used to talk about cultural values at all, just cultural practices—things that have little or no moral valence. That phrasing doesn’t quite capture the distinction I want—the Thai businessman who won’t shake hands with you doesn’t think his choice is arbitrary, after all—but it’s close. Another rule might be “don’t use these statements to pass moral judgement”, but that’s hard to apply; as you saw it can be difficult to notice that you’re doing it until after the fact.
Oooooh, I like this a lot. In particular, this resolves for me a bit of tension about why I liked the above comment and also disagreed with it—you’ve helped me split those reactions out into two different buckets. Seems relevant to common-knowledge-type stacks as well.
Strong appreciation for this comment/strong endorsement of the warnings it provides. However, I do nevertheless continue to think it’s well-suited to important topics, having seen it productively used on important topics in my own experience.
“Important” was not the right word, I agree; I took a slightly better stab at it in the last paragraph of my reply to ZeitPolizei upthread. Vocabulary aside, would you agree that there’s a class of cultural values that this framing doesn’t help you talk about?
I want to think further and also want to answer you now, so: knee-jerk response without too much thought is something like “there’s a class of cultural values that this framing is insufficient to help you talk about, but it feels to me like a piece of the puzzle that lets you bridge the gap.”
i.e. I agree there are ways this can be counterproductive for whole categories of important communication. But I’d probably route through this thing anyway, given my current state of knowledge?
Would not be surprised to find myself talked out of this viewpoint.
I like this comment.