THE BLOG

08/01/2012 11:28 am ET Updated Oct 01, 2012

How Important Is Culture in Shaping Our

Behavior?
By David Vognar


Technically, culture is always “in the news,” and not just in the arts and
entertainment section of our newspapers. It is like unacknowledged water to a
fish, or the oxygen we breathe. Yet recently culture has been an explicit topic
of debate. After Mitt Romney took flak for saying that the power of culture was
responsible for the different living standards of Israelis and Palestinians and
some tried to understand how pop culture might have influenced Aurora,
Colorado, shooter James Holmes, it is worthwhile to examine the ways that
culture does and does not influence our behavior.

Romney’s invocation of culture as a means of explaining how one group of

people succeeds and another doesn’t may be misleading because Israel’s
culture has been through fits and starts and is still hammering out a coherent
identity. As David Brook’s has written, and though it might seem strange to an
outsider, Israel was not always considered to have such a modern culture.
“The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the
Jews in the Diaspora were strongest,” Brooks writes. “Instead of research and
commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and
politics.” Only recently have Israeli research and intellectual exchange
blossomed to become hallmarks of that society, Brooks writes.

Many have attempted to describe the great intellectual achievements of the

Jews, both in diaspora and those that have returned to Israel. In his book The
Brain and its Self, The Jewish Hungarian neurochemist Joseph Knoll writes
that struggling to survive in the ghettos of Europe and perforce acquiring
neurochemical drives allowed the Jewish people to transmit superior brain
development to the next generation. “In retrospect we may say that to survive
Jews were always required to better exploit the physiological endowments of
their brains,” he writes.
So in this important way, culture does matter quite a bit to how we behave and
how we think. Knoll’s assessment is in line with what influential psychologist
and neuroscientist Merlin Donald has written on culture’s influence on our
brain functioning — and even our brain structure. Merlin holds that language
has the biggest impact on brain structure but that culture influences brain
functioning to a great extent. In his book A Mind So Rare, he writes:

“The social environment includes many factors that impinge on development, from bonding
and competitive stress to the social facilitation of learning. These can affect brain
functioning in many ways, but usually they have no direct influence on functional brain
architecture. However, symbolizing cultures own a direct path into our brains and affect the
way major parts of the executive brain become wired up during development. This is the
key idea behind the notion of deep enculturation... This process entails setting up the very
complex hierarchies of cognitive demons (automatic programs) that ultimately establish the
possibility of new forms of thought. Culture effectively wires up functional subsystems in the
brain that would not otherwise exist.”

This is not to say that culture is responsible for everything we do and think.
Indeed, the very formation of the culture that helped the diaspora Jews
succeed was a result of circumstance, rather horrific circumstance. And
sometimes glomming onto the idea of culture’s potency can have disastrous
results. The now discredited broken windows theory held that a culture of
crime can quickly take root if citizens are not bonded together to keep up their
neighborhoods and remain serious about punishing minor crimes. The theory
resulted in an uptick in intense community policing, but was not actually
responsible for the drop in crime rates of the late 1990s. It did result in the
incarceration of many African Americans for petty crimes.

Using culture as the lens to explain success and failure also obscures more
widespread (and harder to control) socioeconomic and biological factors. To
truly understand culture’s role in shaping us, we must understand that culture
is not just the inert repository of ideas and customs we all live with, but that it
too is shaped by various factors. As President Obama wrote in The Audacity
of Hope, fending off claims that black culture is to blame for African
Americans’ plight, “In other words, African Americans understand that culture
matters but that culture is shaped by circumstance. We know that many in the
inner city are trapped by their own self-destructive behavior but that those
behavior are not innate.” It is naive to believe, as the now discredited New
Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer did, that culture creates a person. Culture shapes
us, but many events mold culture and we shape these just as much.
To blame our culture for the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, would be
wrongheaded and many in the media have pointed this out for reasons
beyond psychological self-defense. Even if culture is a primary factor in our
lives, and that largely depends on the person’s receptivity to culture, it would
be nearly impossible to create a culture ahead of time that is conducive to
producing better behavior and healthier thoughts. This is because much of
culture depends on our biological and evolutionary hardware, which is in flux.
And our evolutionary heritage is largely one of aggression and violence,
despite our pains to sublimate these influences through cultural activities like
art and religion. Thus, if we are to blame anything for a tragic mass shooting,
it must be our vestigial aggression.

Interestingly, some scientists believe that culture may be adaptive and thus
help our brains function better to help us reproduce more successfully. This
would cast culture in relief as something that is both important for our survival
and also subject to the whims of those harder to control and much bigger
forces in life. At the least, it absolves filmmakers who explore issues of
violence and responsibility, like those that made the most recent Batman
installment. More broadly, it could account in part for how some cultures help
their members achieve.

Yet we shouldn’t get too hung up on pitting cultures against each other, as
Romney did in Israel. In his Lyrical and Critical Essays, Albert Camus writes,
“Men express themselves in harmony with their land. And superiority, as far
as culture is concerned, lies in this harmony and nothing else. There are no
higher or lower cultures. There are cultures that are more or less true.” The
goal should be to emulate the truest, noblest aspects of every culture and try
to learn about each culture’s people. The benefits to brain development or
reproduction would surely be just as great in exploring others’ ways of life as
immersing oneself in a single nation’s or group’s traditions, however beneficial
that one culture may be.
We review contemporary work on cultural factors affecting moral judgments
and values, and those affecting moral behaviors. In both cases, we highlight
examples of within-societal cultural differences in morality, to show that these
can be as substantial and important as cross-societal differences. Whether
between or within nations and societies, cultures vary substantially in their
promotion and transmission of a multitude of moral judgments and behaviors.
Cultural factors contributing to this variation include religion, social ecology
(weather, crop conditions, population density, pathogen prevalence,
residential mobility), and regulatory social institutions such as kinship
structures and economic markets. This variability raises questions for
normative theories of morality, but also holds promise for future descriptive
work on moral thought and behavior.

Why some countries have developed and others are not, why some
countries are unstable and others are not, why people in some
countries don’t care about their country but in others people do,
why? because of the culture, culture is a collective attribute of a
group, how they react, what they eat, what they perceive as good
or bad, what they think is normal or not normal.
Culture plays a vital role in shaping the society and the country. A
good culture makes it easy and natural to progress, a collective
progressive behaviour is a boon to a country. It seems like
progress is happening automatically.

What shapes culture

How culture affects citizens, citizens reflect the culture, you can
easily identify a culture by examining the behaviour and acts of
local people in a country, observe how they react to a negative
stimulus and how they react to a dishonest/unfair opportunity,
put them in a situation and see how they react. It’s not that this
behaviour is their individual responsibility, the culture plays an
important role, for most of the people the behaviour is just built
automatically through experiences and events they experienced
and they don’t give a serious thought on how different experiences
and events shape their behaviour.

Political leadership
In a country, the political landscape changes with time, and people
with diverse beliefs and motivations hold power to motivate and
alter the thinking of a majority of people in the country, this belief
and motivation of leaders affect the culture for the good or for the
bad. People learn new habits, certain odd behaviour becomes new
normal and definition of bizarre changes. These leadership
changes over time shape the culture, a good leadership induce and
motivate everybody around them to attain good habits and deliver
their best with honesty and affects the behaviour of almost
everyone in the country. The vice versa of it is also true, a bad
leadership, which has selfish motivation affect the culture badly
and it encourages everyone to act selfish and selfishness creates a
bad culture, in such culture self-interest defines the normal
behaviour and not the social values.
Big events
big events like war, political movements change the culture and
induce new habits in people. Our habits change when we have to
survive in an extraordinary situation, we, human adapt to it
quickly to survive. Like in a place where there is a prolonged war,
people become extremely anxious and children become violent
and people stop caring much about ethical values. If some country
is going through economic crises and people don’t have much
money to feed their children, people develop a bit of dis honesty to
save and earn more money and that become new normal. The bad
thing about these events is that they happen and culture change
but once this event is over, the culture change persist. The
sequence of such events shapes the culture.

How culture affects corporate

productivity
In corporations, the cultural traits like hard work, fair
competition, free speech, open feedback and mutual respect affect
overall corporate’s productivity and longevity. The culture where
employees can speak freely about issues and opportunity helps to
shape the corporate culture. In such an environment new hires
who are mediocre employees of other companies become stars in
the new culture, they probably have never gotten a chance to
perform fairly in earlier organisation’s ill cultured environment
but here they can thrive.

A culture boost not only productivity but creativity also, employees

who know they can talk about new opportunity and would not be
discouraged, usually come up with innovative ideas. Culture also
boost customer trust, a satisfied, happy and respected employee
treat customers well and do his best to make them happy, a happy
mind is best suited to spread happiness.

A lot can be changed and achieved with culture, we as leaders

must understand that in addition to our current responsibilities to
deliver we must think of long term and take right steps and put
forth right examples which shape culture in the right way.

10

 Culture
 Behavior
 Leadership
 Entrepreneurship
 Organizational Culture
 Culture describes a collective way of life, or way of doing things. It is the sum of
attitudes, values, goals, and practices shared by individuals in a group,
organization, or society. Cultures vary over time periods, between countries and
geographic regions, and among groups and organizations. Culture reflects the
moral and ethical beliefs and standards that speak to how people should behave
and interact with others.
 
 Cultural map of the world: This diagram attempts to plot different countries by the importance of
different types of values. One axis represents traditional values to secular-rational values, while the other
axis accounts for survival values and self-expression values. Different groups of countries can be
grouped into certain categories, such as Catholic Europe, English speaking, and Ex-Communist.
 Cultural norms are the shared, sanctioned, and integrated systems of beliefs and
practices that are passed down through generations and characterize a cultural
group. Norms cultivate reliable guidelines for daily living and contribute to the
health and well-being of a culture. They act as prescriptions for correct and moral
behavior, lend meaning and coherence to life, and provide a means of achieving
a sense of integrity, safety, and belonging. These normative beliefs, together with
related cultural values and rituals, impose a sense of order and control on
aspects of life that might otherwise appear chaotic or unpredictable.
 This is where culture intersects with ethics. Since interpretations of what is moral
are influenced by cultural norms, the possibility exists that what is ethical to one
group will not be considered so by someone living in a different culture.
According to cultural relativists this means that there is no singular truth on which
to base ethical or moral behavior for all time and geographic space, as our
interpretations of truths are influenced by our own culture. This approach is in
contrast to universalism, which holds the position that moral values are the same
for everyone. Cultural relativists consider this to be an ethnocentric view, as the
universal set of values proposed by universalists are based on their set of values.
Cultural relativism is also considered more tolerant than universalism because, if
there is no basis for making moral judgments between cultures, then cultures
have to be tolerant of each other.