The Social Animal (24 page)

But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book
Drunken Comportment
, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not.

Researchers from the University of Florida observed couples having coffee in different cities around the world. In London, couples rarely touch each other. In Paris, 110 touches were observed per coffee. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, it was 180.

As Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler report in their book
Connected
, 10 percent of working-age Americans report suffering back pain, but 45 percent of the people in Denmark do, as do 62 percent of the people in Germany. Some Asian cultures have very low back-pain rates, but many people there do suffer from
koro
, a condition in which men become afflicted by the feeling that their penises are retracting into their bodies. The treatment involves asking a trusted family member to hold the penis twenty-four hours a day until the anxiety goes away.

If you bump into a man on the street in the American North, the testosterone level in his bloodstream will not rise appreciably. But if you bump into a man on the street in the American South, where a culture of honor is more prevalent, there will probably be a sharp spike in cortisol and testosterone production. Cities in the South are twice as likely to have words like “gun” in their names (Gun Point, Florida), whereas cities in the North are more than twice as likely to have words like “joy” in their names.

A cultural construct like language can change the way people see the world. Guugu Yimithirr, an aboriginal tongue in Australia, is one of the world’s geographical languages. People don’t say, “Raise your right hand” or “Step backward.” They say, “Raise your north hand” or “Step east.” People who speak geographical languages have amazing orientation senses. They always know which way is north, even in caves. A speaker of the language Tzeltal from Mexico was blindfolded and spun around twenty times. He still had no trouble pointing, north, south, east, and west.

In this way, culture imprints some patterns in our brains and dissolves others. Because Erica grew up in the United States, she had a distinct sense of when something was tacky, even though she couldn’t have easily defined what made it so. Her head was filled with what Douglas Hofstadter calls “comfortable but quite impossible to define abstract patterns,” which were implanted by culture and organized her thinking into concepts such as: sleazeballs, fair play, dreams, wackiness, crackpots, sour grapes, goals, and you and I.

Erica learned that a culture is not a recipe book that creates uniformity. Each culture has its own internal debates and tensions. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that each vital culture contains a continuity of conflict, which allows divergent behavior. Furthermore, in the age of globalization, cultures are not converging. They seem to be growing farther apart.

She also learned that not all cultures are equal. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think this. She had been at Denver long enough to know that she was supposed to think all cultures were wonderful and they were all wonderful in their own unique way. But she wasn’t some rich kid from a suburban high school. She couldn’t afford that kind of bullshit. She needed to know what led to success and what led to failure. She looked at the world and at history, looking for clues and useful lessons she could use.

She came across a Stanford professor named Thomas Sowell, who wrote a series of books called
Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures
, and
Conquests and Cultures
that told her some of the things she needed to know. Erica knew she was supposed to disapprove of Sowell. All her teachers did. But his descriptions jibed with the world she saw around her every day. “Cultures do not exist as simply static ‘differences,’ to be celebrated,” Sowell wrote. They “compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done—better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life.”

Erica had noticed that some groups seemed to outcompete their neighbors and peers. Haitians and Dominicans share an island, but the Dominicans have a
GDP
per capita that is nearly four times higher than that of their neighbors. They have life expectancies that are eighteen years longer and literacy rates 33 percentage points higher. Jews and Italians both lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the first half of the twentieth century, but the Jews rose out much more quickly.

She noticed that some groups made themselves winners wherever they settled. The Lebanese and the Gujarati Indians became successful merchants in different societies with different conditions all around the world. In Ceylon in 1969, the Tamil minority provided 40 percent of all university students in the sciences, including 48 percent of all engineering students and 49 percent of all medical students. In Argentina, 46 percent of the businessmen in
Who’s Who
were foreign born. In Chile, three-quarters of the heads of large industrial enterprises were immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In American schools, Chinese American kids raced ahead. By the time they enter kindergarten, Chinese Americans are four months ahead of Latino children in letter recognition and other pre-reading skills. They take more demanding high-school courses than the average American student. They do much more homework each night. They are more likely to be punished at home if they earn a grade lower than an A-. Roughly 54 percent of Asian Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine have graduated from college, compared to 34 percent of native-born white Americans.

These cultural differences can produce stunning inequalities. Asian Americans have a life expectancy of eighty-seven years compared with seventy-nine years for whites and seventy-three years for African Americans. In Michigan, a state with a struggling economy, the Asian American life expectancy is ninety, while for the average white person it’s seventy-nine and for the average African American it’s seventy-three. Income and education levels are also much higher. The average Asian American in New Jersey lives an amazing twenty-six years longer and is eleven times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

Erica also noticed that some cultures are more corrupt than others. In their study, “Cultures of Corruption,” Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel took advantage of a natural experiment. Until 2002 diplomats in New York City could avoid parking fines. Fisman and Miguel analyzed the data from 1,700 consular personnel and their families to see who took advantage of their immunity and who didn’t. They found that diplomats from countries that rank high on the Transparency International corruption index piled up huge numbers of unpaid tickets, whereas diplomats from countries that ranked low on the index barely got any at all. Between 1997 and 2002, diplomats from Kuwait picked up 246 parking violations per diplomat. Diplomats from Egypt, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Mozambique, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Syria also had incredible numbers of violations. Meanwhile diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway, and Canada had no violations at all. Even thousands of miles away from home, diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads. The results were not influenced by salary, age, or any other of the measured controls.

Erica noticed, in sum, that certain cultures are better adapted for modern development than others. In one class she was assigned a book called
The Central Liberal Truth
by Lawrence E. Harrison. People in what he calls progress-prone cultures assume that they can shape their own destiny. People in progress-resistant cultures are more fatalistic. People in progress-prone cultures assume that wealth is the product of human creativity and is expandable. People in progress-resistant cultures have a zero-sum assumption that what exists will always be.

People in progress-prone cultures live to work, he argues. People in progress-resistant cultures work to live. People in progress-prone cultures share other values. They are more competitive; they are more optimistic; they value tidiness and punctuality; they place incredible emphasis on education; they do not see their family as a fortress in a hostile world, they see it as a gateway to the wider society; they internalize guilt and hold themselves responsible for what happens; they do not externalize guilt and blame others.

Erica became convinced that this cultural substructure shaped decisions and behavior more than most economists or most business leaders realized. This was where the action was.

Late in her college career, Erica opened up her laptop and wrote a memo to herself. She tried to write some lessons or rules that would help encapsulate what she’d learned by studying cultural differences. The first maxim she wrote to herself was “Think in Networks.”

Society isn’t defined by classes, as the Marxists believe. It’s not defined by racial identity. And it’s not a collection of rugged individualists, as some economic and social libertarians believe. Instead, Erica concluded, society is a layering of networks.

When she was bored, she would actually sit down and draw up network charts for herself and her friends. Sometimes she’d put a friend’s name in the middle of a piece of paper and then draw lines to all the major attachments in that person’s life, and then she’d draw lines showing how strongly those hubs were attached to one another. If she’d gone out with friends the night before, she might draw a chart showing how all the people in the group were socially attached.

Erica felt sure she’d understand people better if she saw them linked and in context. She wanted to train herself to think of people as embedded creatures, whose decisions emerge from a specific mental environment.

“Be the Glue,” Erica wrote next. She would look at her charts of the networks and she would ask herself, “What do those lines connecting people consist of?” In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust.

Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.

Trust reduces friction and lowers transaction costs. People in companies filled with trust move flexibly and cohesively. People who live in trusting cultures form more community organizations. People in more trusting cultures have wider stock market-participation rates. People in trusting cultures find it easier to organize and operate large corporations. Trust creates wealth.

Erica noticed that there are different levels and types of trust in different communities, different schools, different dorms, and different universities. In his classic study
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society
, Edward Banfield noticed that peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit. Germany and Japan have high levels of social trust, enabling them to build tightly knit industrial firms. The United States is a collective society that thinks it is an individualistic one. If you ask Americans to describe their values, they will give you the most individualistic answers of any nation on the planet. Yet if you actually watch how Americans behave, you see they trust one another instinctively and form groups with alacrity.

Erica decided she would never work in a place where people didn’t trust one another. Once she got a job, she would be the glue. She would be the one organizing outings, making connections, building trust. She would carry information from person to person. She would connect one worker to another. If everybody around her drew a network chart of their life, she’d be on every one.

The final maxim Erica wrote to herself that day was, “Be an Idea-Space Integrator.” Erica noticed that the greatest artists often combined what Richard Ogle in his book
Smart World
calls two mental spaces. Picasso inherited the traditions of Western art, but he also responded to the masks of African art. The merging of these two idea spaces created
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
and Picasso’s fantastic burst of creativity.

Erica resolved that she would always try to stand at the junction between two mental spaces. In organizations, she would try to stand at the junction of two departments, or fill in the gaps between departments. Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago has a concept he calls structural holes. In any society there are clumps of people doing certain tasks. But between those clumps there are holes, places in between where there are no people and there is no structure. These are the places where the flow of ideas stops, the gaps separating one part of a company from another. Erica would occupy space in those holes. She would span the distance from one group of people to another—reach out to discordant clumps and bring their ideas together. In a world of discordant networks and cultures, she would find her destiny and her role.