The "Richard Lewis Model" Explains Every Culture In The World

Someone on Facebook linked to this article, but I have forgotten who - sorry. From Business Insider, Gus Lubin offers a brief profile of British linguist Richard Lewis and his model of cultures. Lewis has plotted out the world's cultures on three qualities: Linear-actives (people who pursue goals in a linear, step-by-step manner), Multi-actives (multi-taskers who operate less by schedules or more by importance), and Reactives (groups who prioritize courtesy and respect).

Here is a brief description of his book (When Cultures Collide, 3rd Edition: Leading Across Cultures) from Amazon:

In this thoroughly updated and expanded 3rd edition of the groundbreaking book, When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures, Richard Lewis includes every major region of the world and more than sixty countries! Capturing the rising influence of culture and the seismic changes throughout many regions of the world, cross-cultural expert and international businessman Richard Lewis has significantly broadened the scope of his seminal work on global business and intercultural communication. Included are new chapters on more than a dozen countries. Within each country-specific chapter, Lewis provides invaluable insight into the beliefs, values, behaviors, mannerisms and prejudices of each culture, lending helpful advice on topics to discuss and those to avoid when communicating, guides to interpreting unique terminology, and modes of behavior that will contribute to successful communication and lasting relationships. Lewis advises on overarching guidelines for proper overseas manners, whether in a restaurant, at the home of a colleague or in the boardroom. Using dozens of scientific, yet highly accessible diagrams and building on his Linear-active, Multi-active and Reactive (LMR) culture type model, Lewis gives managers and leaders practical strategies to embrace differences and work successfully across an increasingly diverse business culture.The 3rd Edition of the popular When Cultures Collide grows in size and information. It contains an additional three countries and regions that now 'play significant roles on the world stage' and include coverage of newer EU member states, the Indian subcontinent, the 'Arab Lands,' the Sub-Saharan region and Latin America in more detail. Country chapters in the new edition also include sidebars that provide a quick look at key motivating factors in each country.
- Kate Berardo, DELTA Intercultural Academy contributor 

Contents

PART I: GETTING TO GRIPS WITH CULTURAL DIVERSITY

• Different Languages, Different Worlds
• Cultural Conditioning
• Categorization of Cultures
• The Use of Time
• Bridging the Communication Gap
• Manners (and Mannerisms)

PART II: MANAGING AND LEADING IN DIFFERENT CULTURES

• Status, Leadership, and Organization
• Team Building and Horizons
• Motivating People and Building Trust
• Meetings of the Minds

PART THREE: GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER

• English-Speaking Countries Western European Countries
• Central and Eastern European Countries
• Nordic Countries
• The Baltic States and Central Asian Countries
• Middle Eastern Countries
• Asian (South, Southeast, East) Countries
• Latin American Countries
• Sub-Saharan African Countries

Here is the article Lubin:

The Lewis Model Explains Every Culture In The World

Gus Lubin | Sept. 6, 2013

A world traveler who speaks ten languages, British linguist Richard Lewis decided he was qualified to plot the world's cultures on a chart.

He did so while acknowledging the dangers of stereotypes.

"Determining national characteristics is treading a minefield of inaccurate assessment and surprising exception," Lewis wrote. "There is, however, such a thing as a national norm."

Many people think he nailed it, as his book When Cultures Collide, 3rd Edition: Leading Across Cultures, now in its third edition, has sold more than one million copies since it was first published in 1996 and was called "an authoritative roadmap to navigating the world's economy," by the Wall Street Journal.

Lewis plots countries in relation to three categories:

• Linear-actives — those who plan, schedule, organize, pursue action chains, do one thing at a time. Germans and Swiss are in this group.
• Multi-actives — those lively, loquacious peoples who do many things at once, planning their priorities not according to a time schedule, but according to the relative thrill or importance that each appointment brings with it. Italians, Latin Americans and Arabs are members of this group.
• Reactives — those cultures that prioritize courtesy and respect, listening quietly and calmly to their interlocutors and reacting carefully to the other side's proposals. Chinese, Japanese and Finns are in this group.

He says that this categorization of national norms does not change significantly over time:

The behavior of people of different cultures is not something willy-nilly. There exist clear trends, sequences and traditions. Reactions of Americans, Europeans, and Asians alike can be forecasted, usually justified and in the majority of cases managed. Even in countries where political and economic change is currently rapid or sweeping (Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Korea, Malaysia, etc.) deeply rooted attitudes and beliefs will resist a sudden transformation of values when pressured by reformists, governments or multinational conglomerates.

Here's the chart that explains the world:

 Richard Lewis Model (www.crossculture.com)

Some more details on the categories:

Lewis Model (www.crossculture.com)

The point of all of this analysis is to understand how to interact with people from different cultures, a subject in which Richard Lewis Communications provides coaching and consultation.

"By focusing on the cultural roots of national behavior, both in society and business, we can foresee and calculate with a surprising degree of accuracy how others will react to our plans for them, and we can make certain assumptions as to how they will approach us," Lewis writes.

Ethan Watters: We Aren't the World - Cultural Differences in Values and Perceptions

In this excellent article by Ethan Watters in Pacific Standard, a variety of assumptions made by Western psychologists and economists about human behavior (based on studies of Western populations) are revealed to be misguided and false when other cultures are assessed.

The article is very long, and worth the time to read it, but I am only posting a section of it here (what would be considered the second section). Follow the title link below to read the whole interesting piece.

We Aren’t the World

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.

(ILLUSTRATION: MARK MCGINNIS)

February 25, 2013 • By Ethan Watters

* * * * *

A MODERN LIBERAL ARTS education gives lots of lip service to the idea of cultural diversity. It’s generally agreed that all of us see the world in ways that are sometimes socially and culturally constructed, that pluralism is good, and that ethnocentrism is bad. But beyond that the ideas get muddy. That we should welcome and celebrate people of all backgrounds seems obvious, but the implied corollary—that people from different ethno-cultural origins have particular attributes that add spice to the body politic—becomes more problematic. To avoid stereotyping, it is rarely stated bluntly just exactly what those culturally derived qualities might be. Challenge liberal arts graduates on their appreciation of cultural diversity and you’ll often find them retreating to the anodyne notion that under the skin everyone is really alike.

If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of cultural imperialism.

Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.

Some of that research went back a generation. It was in the 1960s, for instance, that researchers discovered that aspects of visual perception were different from place to place. One of the classics of the literature, theMüller-Lyer illusion, showed that where you grew up would determine to what degree you would fall prey to the illusion that these two lines are different in length:

Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (B) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (A). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length. Subjects from more than a dozen cultures were tested, and Americans were at the far end of the distribution—seeing the illusion more dramatically than all others.

More recently psychologists had challenged the universality of research done in the 1950s by pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch had discovered that test subjects were often willing to make incorrect judgments on simple perception tests to conform with group pressure. When the test was performed across 17 societies, however, it turned out that group pressure had a range of influence. Americans were again at the far end of the scale, in this case showing the least tendency to conform to group belief.

As Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich furthered their search, they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies. When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way (with a lawsuit, a call to the Better Business Bureau, or a bad Yelp review) when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had a different history, their gut feeling about what was fair was distinctly their own. In the small-scale societies with a strong culture of gift-giving, yet another conception of fairness prevailed. There, generous financial offers were turned down because people’s minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations. Our economies hadn’t been shaped by our sense of fairness; it was the other way around.

The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind’s capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do—the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like—but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception.

For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.

When unconsciously translated in three dimensions, the line with the outward-feathered ends (C) appears farther away and the brain therefore judges it to be longer. The more time one spends in natural environments, where there are no carpentered corners, the less one sees the illusion.

As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?”(pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

Read the whole article.

Dr. Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Dr. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, has a new book out, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Here I bring together two recent interviews with Diamond, the first from UCLA Magazine and the second from Life on Earth, an NPR program that airs here in Tucson, but comes from PRI (Public Radio International).

I like his definition of WEIRD societies: "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic."

The World Until Yesterday

Published Jan 1, 2013

By Jack Feuer

Learn how to avoid diabetes. Or heart disease. Realize that religion is not just theology. And make sure your children speak more than one language. There is much in traditional societies that those of us in advanced cultures can adopt to live better as nations and individuals, says famed UCLA Professor of Geography Jared Diamond — author of the acclaimed mega-bestsellers Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel — in his new book, The World Until Yesterday.

Q: Why choose this topic?

A: Because it's what I've lived for the last 50 years of my life. Since 1964, I've been working on the island of New Guinea in cultures that were and partly still are traditional, small-scale cultures without centralized government, without law courts, and doing many things in traditional ways that have all these fascinating differences from our own ways. They settle disputes in different ways, they have different attitudes towards danger, they raise their children differently, they treat their old people differently and their health is very different.

Some of those ways horrified me, but some of them were wonderful, and I've incorporated them into my own life. So my book originated from what I learned from my New Guinea friends, but then it broadened into a survey of traditional societies around the world.

Q: In the book, you talk about the shortcomings of research that's limited to what you call "WEIRD" societies.

A: It's an acronym coined by a former UCLA grad student named Joe Henrich M.A. '95, Ph.D. '99 and his colleagues, and it stands for "Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic." The essence is that when we talk about human societies and we make comparisons, usually the comparisons are [between such nations as] Germany, Japan, the United States, Argentina and Indonesia — advanced, industrialized, educated societies. And such societies didn't exist until 5,000 years ago, so they are just a narrow slice of humanity. Worse yet, most studies by psychologists are just on American college undergraduates who major in psychology. It's a "WEIRD" sample.

Q: You note in The World Until Yesterday how fast traditional societies often become Westernized. Does that have any bearing on the lessons we can learn from them?

A: In the case of New Guinea, on the coast, Europeans started prowling around in the 1600s, but the first colonial government wasn't set up in coastal New Guinea until the 1880s, so Westernization there has been going on very slowly. It's only been in the last few decades that the [Westernized] epidemic of diabetes started, so that has taken 400 years. In the highlands, Europeans didn't arrive until the 1930s and 1950s. I met highlanders who had only come under European influence five years before I met them, and yet they're already speaking pidgin English and some of them were writing. So there's enormous variation in speed. My guess is the quicker the speed of change, the more drastic the changes.

Q: You chose nine broad fields to discuss in 11 chapters and left out others. Why those and not others?

A: Because if I included the other topics, the book would have been 7,000 pages long. ... I selected things into which I had some insight, a range of things to illustrate the differences between traditional and modern societies. Things that we can do ourselves, such as how we raise our children and our attitudes towards danger. Things that we want to get away from, like war. Things that we certainly want to emulate, like not dying of cancer, heart disease and stroke. There's also the issue of religion. And, of course, settling disputes.

Q: You break human organizations into four groups: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. Are there tribes that act like states and states that act like chiefdoms?

A: Even within the U.S., a WEIRD society, there's a lot that's essentially tribal. In small, rural areas where everybody knows everybody, if you have a dispute with your neighbor, you probably will not immediately hire a lawyer ... you probably work it out or find mediators. Or in downtown Los Angeles, when urban gangs have disputes, they don't go to a priest or a lawyer. They work out their disputes in traditional ways of compensation or retaliation. That's part of why the title of my book is The World Until Yesterday. Because yesterday is still with us.

Q: Other topics you explore include the elderly, languages and multilingualism. What can we learn from multilingualism?

A: We know that children raised multilingually do not suffer a disadvantage in learning language. They are not less effective at speaking English. They are more effective at learning other languages and then, the bombshell which has come out in the last five years is that the best protection that we now know of against Alzheimer's disease and other dementias of old age is to be multilingual. So that is a very strong argument for raising children multilingually.

Q: What can we learn from traditional societies about religion?

A: Religion is one of those things that differ so much between traditional and modern societies. Religion is often conceived as belief in the supernatural and God. But there is much more to it than that. In fact, I conclude my chapter on religion with the stories of three friends of mine in whose lives religion is important for reasons that have nothing to do with theology. Almost all of us go through a phase where we deal with religion; either we lose our original faith or we were brought up without it and we get interested and explore religion, or we change religions as one of my friends did. All of us inevitably try to figure out what religion means to us. I think it's valuable to realize that religion is not just a matter of supernatural beliefs.

Q: One of the most poignant parts of the book was when you talk about how quickly people who come here from traditional societies begin to develop Western diseases. Why is that such a pernicious effect, and does the trend work in reverse?

A: Absolutely. There are lots of people who choose the reverse trend in the U.S. or elsewhere. Americans who have learned about traditional diets or are overweight and beginning to develop diabetes or heart problems may be able to avoid these problems by watching what they eat and by exercising. Whole countries have adopted these ideas as matters of national strategy, and the results are dramatic.

Q: In this book and throughout your work, you say there's no magic bullet. If you don't handle every aspect of a problem, you don't solve the problem. Given that, how do we fix things in our societies?

A: People often ask me, "What is the one most important thing that our society needs to do or that I need to do in my own life?" And my flip but accurate answer is, "Learn not to look for the one most important thing to do." For instance, you often hear people ask, "What's the one most important requirement for a happy marriage?" Anyone who asks that question is bound for divorce. To have a happy marriage, you have to get 37 things right: sex, money, children, values, religion, inlaws, and 31 other things. If you agree about all of them but the in-laws, that's enough to get you divorced.

Q: Then what problem do you tackle first?

A: We don't do things "first" in life. We multitask. It's not like I'm going to devote the next two years of my life to solving my genetic heritage. And then two years from now, I'll get to culture. The reality is that, of course, we deal with things simultaneously.

Q: You're a National Medal of Science winner. You have a doctorate in physiology. Why write books about popular science?

A: Academics are not supposed to write books for the general public. They're supposed to write research papers on gall bladders and other arcane subjects. But American science has severe financial problems. Lawmakers do not understand the importance of science. And they're not going to understand it until we, the faculty, explain these things in terms that the general public can understand.

* * * * *

Here is the episode of NPR's Life on Earth.

The World Until Yesterday

Air Date: Week of January 4, 2013



stream/download this segment as an MP3 file

Best-selling author Jared Diamond‘s new book “The World Until Yesterday” is part anthropology, part personal memoir drawing on decades of field work in New Guinea. He tells host Steve Curwood the book explores lessons westerners could learn from tribal cultures on issues as varied as conflict, childcare and personal safety.

Transcript:

CURWOOD: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" are two of the mostinfluential social anthropology books ever written. Now author and UCLA professor Jared Diamond is out with a new volume, “The World Until Yesterday.” Professor Diamond intended to write a small book of personal memoirs but says his editors had other plans.

DIAMOND: So, the book evolved into an examination of traditional small societies all around the world throughout history, laced with my anecdotes from New Guinea and learning what lessons these societies have to teach us about how to conduct our own personal lives.

CURWOOD: This new book opens at an airport in Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea, where Diamond was struck by the rapid modernization of the island's peoples over the decades that he's done field work there.

Jared Diamond is a UCLA geography professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Guns Germs, and Steel.“ (Wikimedia Commons) 

DIAMOND: It's taken a couple hundred thousand years for anatomically modern humans in many parts of Eurasia to transform themselves from hunter-gatherers without writing to famers and industrial people with writing. But in New Guinea, this has happened in parts of New Guinea within a few decades. And some friends of mine in New Guinea grew up making stone tools and then by the time I met them they were using steel tools and they had writing. The changes have been telescoped in New Guinea into a short time. 

CURWOOD: One of your most interesting observations was the different number of people who were in the modern airport and how they would have behaved in the past – can you describe some of that for us? 

DIAMOND: Sure. The New Guinea capital city airport that I was in, in 2006, was a normal airport in that when I came in there, there was nobody else in that airport whom I knew – everybody was strangers, the baggage attendants, all the other passengers, and for me, of course, that’s no big deal in our modern society, we’re always encountering strangers. On my drive down here today, everybody that I was passing was a stranger. 

But in traditional New Guinea and in any traditional society, people don’t move. If you move, there are rules about who is your friend and who are your enemies. Any stranger is assumed to be an enemy. And so that 2006 New Guinea scene where I was surrounded by strangers would have been unthinkable in traditional New Guinea. I would have freaked out, I would have expected to be killed instantaneously, I would have run or started attacking other people. 

CURWOOD: Now, you tell an interesting story, in Papua New Guinea, about this tension among strangers, and how folks diffuse the war that would otherwise begin. And what I’m thinking of is the story of this driver for a company who’s zipping along, a kid darts out from behind a bus and gets run over and killed. The driver, of course, is now expecting that the family of this little boy will now try to kill him. How did this situation get resolved and how does that reflect traditional values and how might we use those values today? 

DIAMOND: It’s a gut-wrenching story that was told to me by a friend of mine who was in New Guinea. There was a traffic accident, so, a kid ran out incautiously across the street and got killed. If such a thing happens in the United States, the state intervenes, there may be a criminal case if the driver was incautious, and certainly, there may be a civil case where the relatives of the dead child are going to sue the driver for having killed the child. 

 

In New Guinea, it’s different. In this case, the next day, the father of the dead boy came to visit the employer of the driver. And the employer was afraid that there was going to be violence but, no, the father of the dead boy wanted to settle the matter in the traditional New Guinea way by payment of compensation. In this case the compensation was large by New Guinea standards, it was several hundred dollars and some food, but trivial by our standards. 

And after negotiations, on I think, the fifth day after the accident, the relatives of the dead boy, the father and mother and uncles, sat down together for a meal with the employer of the driver. They made speeches in which they talked about missing the dead boy. My friend made a speech in which he ended up crying because he said, ‘I’m identifying with what you must be going through because I also have young children and nothing can compensate for the death of a young child.’ The end result after five days was that the whole matter was settled, there was emotional clearance, the people went on with their lives, whereas in the United States, the idea that after 5 days you would sit down with the killer of your child is unthinkable. Instead, there would be a lawsuit. 

 

So, this illustrates that in New Guinea, disputes are settled in a way that aims at emotional clearance and getting on with your life. Whereas in a state government, you never meet the person again, the last thing you hear about is emotional clearance and you spend the rest of your life churned up with feelings left over from the accident. 

CURWOOD: Now, traditional society in many respects sounds wonderful, and then there are horrible things like killing babies, you mention in your book that sometimes if a baby is born and has a deformity, or sometimes in the case of twins, the mother will kill the newborn for the sake of the tribe as a whole. Can you explain that? 

 

DIAMOND: Yes, it’s true that in many traditional societies, babies who are born impaired are killed. What on earth, though, can you do if you are living in a marginal society? It’s also the case that if you are living in traditional societies, some of them are abandoned or killed…their old people. But what again can you do if you are a small group that is walking to the next camp and you’ve got an old person who is not capable of walking? So, there are both things that we find horrible in traditional societies, and things that we find wonderful in them – often how they bring up their children, often how they treat their old people, how they approach danger, how they remain healthy. 

CURWOOD: When you write about the elderly, you title your chapter “Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill” and I suppose that sums it all up, but perhaps you could expand on that for us. 

DIAMOND: Those are the extremes of choices about what to do with old people. This is an issue that interests me increasingly having passed my 75th birthday some months ago. I used to, when I was a child, thought of 75 as being really old. And now it feels to me as if I’m entering the prime of life. So, in traditional societies, depending on circumstances, old people may be abandoned if there is no way for taking care of them, for example, if the society is nomadic; old people may be encouraged to commit suicide, they may be actively killed. 

 

But at the opposite side, old people in societies that are sedentary, that live in permanent huts and villages where it’s easy to take care of old people, then old people will spend their old years surrounded by their children and relatives and friends and they have much more socially rich life, satisfying life, they have much more value than in modern American society. 

CURWOOD: I thought the section on raising children was really fascinating. Here in the US most of the games our kids play are teaching them, well, how to compete with their peers. But in your experience from New Guinea, the games that children play in are largely about teaching them how to share. Why do you suppose that is? 

DIAMOND: Probably because they are living in small societies where the people with whom you are playing games are the people you’ll be dealing with for the rest of your life. It’s the case that in a really small society, one individual is not supposed to get ahead, instead any individual who is successful is expected to share what he or she gets with other people. But conversely, if you are down on your luck, then you can get food and things from other people. 

So, sharing is necessary for survival in traditional societies, in contrast with modern American society. We stress the individual, getting ahead, you do as well as you can and you’re certainly not going to share everything you’ve acquired with all of your relatives and cousins and people you knew 10 years ago. 

CURWOOD: As we were preparing for our interview with you, this was happening just as the mass shooting came to light in Newton, Connecticut. I kept wondering how would a tribal community handle a member of the tribe who was emotionally unbalanced in that way. 

 

DIAMOND: I’ll give you an example of how a tribal community did deal with a member of the tribe who was emotionally unbalanced. This example came from the Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert of Southwest Africa. The Kung formerly, occasionally, killed each other, and when state control came into place over the Kung, the killing stopped. But there was among the last killings, there, a Kung man who was really, really dangerous and possibly deranged by our standards. He had killed several people. 

And finally what happened was that a group of men went into his band, he was there surrounded by members of his band, and in the presence of his relatives, they killed him. The relatives did not interfere because they recognized that this guy was dangerous and deranged, they were too afraid to take care of him themselves, but they did not interfere when other people eliminated him. So, that’s one way to deal with dangerous people in small-scale societies. 

CURWOOD: You coined a term in this book that you call constructive paranoia. And you write a couple of chapters about dangers and how to stay safe with this concept - tell me more about this. 

 

DIAMOND: Sure. Dealing with danger is one of the things that I observed in New Guinea and that I have learned that have had the biggest impact on my life and my attitude towards nature. I was camping out with some New Guineans, I was picking campsites in a forest, and I picked what I thought was a gorgeous campsite under a colossal, beautiful tree. And, the New Guineans with me freaked out and they said, ‘we’re not going to sleep under this tree.’ And I said, ‘what’s the matter? Why not?’ And they said, ‘because the tree is dead.’ And I looked up and saw that yes, it is dead, but it was such a big, huge tree that I said ‘it’s not going to fall down for 50 years, don’t be silly.’ 

But, no, they were not going to sleep under that dead tree. I thought their fears were exaggerated, but then, as I spent more time in New Guinea forest, I realized: OK, well the chance is 1 in 1,000 that this tree is going to crash on me tonight, but if I expect to spend 10,000 nights in the forest because I expect to live 30 years and I spend a lot of time in the forest, if I ignore 1 in 1,000 risks, by the time I’ve run that risk 10,000 times, I’ll have died 10 times over. 

How that affects me now is that when I shower in the morning, I recognize that for older people, slipping in the shower is one of the big risks of life, and yes, the chance of my falling down in the shower this morning was only 1 in 1,000, but I intend to take a shower every day for the next 20 or 30 years, and if I’m not careful in the shower then I’m going to end up with a broken hip and then probably be dead. So that’s an example of constructive paranoia guiding my own life. I’m very careful about small things that each time you do them aren’t dangerous but that will eventually catch up with you if you’re not careful. 

CURWOOD: Jared Diamond, you are 75 years old now, and you spent most of your adult life traveling back and forth to remote corners of the earth and spending time among traditional tribal peoples. So how did the things you learned inform how you live your life and the way that you raised your own children? 

DIAMOND: One is my attitude towards danger that I mentioned. The other is raising children, so I have twin sons who are now 25 years old, and my observations from New Guineans raising their own children informed my raising my children. One thing is that New Guineans and traditional people in general allow their children as much freedom as possible. They consider children to be autonomous creatures capable of making their own decisions and I let my kids make their own decisions insofar as possible. 

 

There were some surprising results (laughs). At the age of three my son Max fell in love at first sight with snakes. My wife and I are not snake lovers, but alright, Max loves snakes and let’s help him keep snakes as pets and Max ended up with 147 pet snakes and frogs and lizards. Eventually he got beyond snakes and he got interested in cooking so now he’s a professional chef. But that’s an example of allowing kids the opportunity to choose what they want. 

And still another example is that never, not once, did I ever hit my children. I found that it was possible to get them to do what was necessary, to discipline them, without hitting, and, that’s again something that I’ve learned from New Guinea; you never, never hit a child. 

CURWOOD: Jared Diamond, what can we expect next from you? Another book, I suppose? 

DIAMOND: Yes! I already have an idea for another book which I expect to publish around my 82nd birthday, but I’m still thinking about what might go into that. 

CURWOOD: Seven years to write. 

DIAMOND: Yes. They take a long time. 

CURWOOD: Thank you so much Jared Diamond. 

DIAMOND: (Laughs.) You’re welcome. 

CURWOOD: Jared Diamond’s new book is called “The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies.”  

Links: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Joshua Hammer - Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Revolutionary Leader

An article in the recent issue of the Smithsonian Magazine looks at how meditation and Buddhist practice helped Aung San Suu Kyi survive house arrest, and how they help her now as a legislator. It's an excellent article, offering a little overview of Buddhism along with the content on Burma and its culture.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Revolutionary Leader

The Nobel Peace Prize winner talks about the secret weapon in her decades of struggle—the power of Buddhism

• By Joshua Hammer
• Smithsonian magazine, September 2012

Here is a little bit of the article:

I ask her whether, as I’ve heard, she is meditating for an hour every morning, following the Buddhist practice that kept her calm during nearly two decades of house arrest. “Not mornings,” she corrects me. “But yes, I’m meditating every day.” Then her security team nudges her away and she mounts the steep staircase leading to the third-floor headquarters.

She and I had first met, only 16 months before, in more tranquil circumstances, before the international frenzy surrounding her escalated exponentially. The setting was the temporary NLD headquarters a few blocks from here, a dilapidated, garage-like structure watched round-the-clock by security agents. In a sparsely furnished lounge on the second floor, she had told me that she took up vipassana, or insight meditation, at Oxford University, where she studied philosophy and politics during the 1960s. The 2,500-year-old technique of self-observation is intended to focus the mind on physical sensation and to liberate the practitioner from impatience, anger and discontent.

Aung San Suu Kyi found meditation difficult at first, she acknowledged. It wasn’t until her first period of house arrest, between 1989 and 1995, she said, that “I gained control of my thoughts” and became an avid practitioner. Meditation helped confer the clarity to make key decisions. “It heightens your awareness,” she told me. “If you’re aware of what you are doing, you become aware of the pros and cons of each act. That helps you to control not just what you do, but what you think and what you say.”

As she evolves from prisoner of conscience into legislator, Buddhist beliefs and practices continue to sustain her. “If you see her diet, you realize that she takes very good care of herself, but in fact it is her mind that keeps her healthy,” I’m told by Tin Myo Win, Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal physician. Indeed, a growing number of neuroscientists believe that regular meditation actually changes the way the brain is wired—shifting brain activity from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to the calmer left frontal cortex. “Only meditation can help her withstand all this physical and mental pressure,” says Tin Myo Win.

It is impossible to understand Aung San Suu Kyi, or Myanmar, without understanding Buddhism. Yet this underlying story has often been eclipsed as the world has focused instead on military brutality, economic sanctions and, in recent months, a raft of political reforms transforming the country.

Buddhists constitute 89 percent of Myanmar’s population, and—along with the ruthless military dictatorship that misruled the country for decades—Buddhism is the most defining aspect of Burmese life.

The golden spires and stupas of Buddhist temples soar above jungle, plains and urbanscapes. Red-robed monks—there are nearly 400,000 of them in Myanmar—are the most revered members of society. Pursuing lives of purity, austerity and self-discipline, they collect alms daily, forging a sacred religious bond with those who dispense charity. Nearly every Burmese adolescent boy dons robes and lives in a monastery for periods of between a few weeks and several years, practicing vipassana. As adults, Burmese return to the monastery to reconnect with Buddhist values and escape from daily pressures. And Buddhism has shaped the politics of Myanmar for generations.

Read more.

Dave Pollard - Collective Mindfulness Practices

 
This is an interesting post from Dave Pollard at How to Save the World (his blog is under the Creative Commons License: some rights reserved). However, I think he is missing a huge piece of the puzzle as to why the effects of violence, addiction, and abuse are so much more visible now - namely, that we are moving into more of a post-modern cultural perspective that honors feelings and experience, whereas many our parents were born into a world that was still largely devoted to rules and roles, which are defined by religion or some other "higher" power.

That is no longer true. Large parts of our society now honor feelings even more than rational thought - with sometimes disastrous results. But it has created an atmosphere where it is not only okay to seek treatment for these childhood traumas, it's actually encouraged, and it's also encouraged to talk about them in public, in magazine interviews, in books/memoirs, and in movies and television.

As far as I can see, this is mostly a good thing.

Later in the article, however, when he talks about collective mindfulness practices, I think he's on to something. Here are some of the practices he has come up with through discussions with Michael and other friends:

1. Ask open, interesting questions, and enable the group to explore them without expecting to find answers.
2. Bohm/Bohmian Dialogue:
   • “Bohm dialogue is a way of being together in a group. Twenty to forty participants sit in a circle, for a few hours during regular meetings, or for a few days in a workshop environment. This is done with no predefined purpose, no agenda, other than that of inquiring into the movement of thought, and exploring the process of ‘thinking together’ collectively. This activity can allow group participants to examine their preconceptions and prejudices, as well as to explore the more general movement of thought.” (Thanks to Seb Paquet for this link)
   • Participants of such Dialogues (the etymological meaning of the word is ‘speaking among’ and the ‘dia-’ means ‘across or among’ not ‘two’ as many think) are urged (a) to suspend judgements and expectations, (b) not to make any group decisions during or at the conclusion of the dialogue (the process is emergent), (c) to practice total honesty, openness and transparency, and (d) to build on rather than challenging or contradicting what has been said before.
   • Rather than being action-oriented (although some users of the approach have coopted it for making decisions and agreeing upon actions), this approach seems to be all about increasing understanding of who we (collectively) are, and appreciation of how our thoughts align and differ, our worldviews and belief systems overlap and diverge, how our minds work, imagine and create, and how we “change” our minds.
3. Karl Weick’s Simplicity Beyond Complexity Sense-making approach:
   • Encourage unstructured conversations to enable shared meaning and understanding to emerge.
   • Enable people to move beyond fixed self-identities, to learn about themselves and see themselves differently and more empowered, more flexible.
   • Appreciate that we often act even before we “make up our minds” and then rationalize what we did, and facilitate a deep understanding of what actually underlies our actions and decisions.
   • Encourage suspension of decisions and avoidance of confirmation bias (hearing what we want to hear and disregarding what doesn’t fit with our worldviews and beliefs).
   • Help people understand that complex processes are dynamic and ongoing and that rigorous analysis, forecasts, predictions, causal certainty, defined goals, ends and mandates are inherently simplistic and unrealistic ways to deal with them.
   • Dig deeper beyond what seems to make ‘perfect’ sense, with the knowledge that the truth is always more profound and complex than we can every fully understand.
   • Iterate and try lots of “safe-fail” explorations and experiments to avoid being locked in to one way of thinking or one course of action.
4. Make music, art, theatre, quilts, or barns together, improvisationally and cohesively.
5. Nature walks, watching the sunrise/sunset/storm/stars, and similar unstructured shared observation and exploration experiences. By this I mean peaceful, silent, reflective activities, not White Mile character-building or cult indoctrination activities. I also don’t mean watching movies or theatre together — such activities, like reading (even while in each other’s arms), take our attention away from the others we attend with, instead of engaging us together as part of a larger whole.
6. Playing together, either collaboratively or, if not, then without intense competition or keeping score. Role-playing games, cooperative board games, ultimate frisbee — it doesn’t really matter what you play.
7. Eating together, without outside distractions.

Be sure to read the whole article - these suggestions make only minimal sense out of context.

Collective Mindfulness Practices

Dave Pollard - Feb. 16, 2012

 

The other day I had lunch with Michael Nenonen, a Vancouver social worker and freelance journalist (and a new friend). Michael has written a lot about the malaise of our modern culture and the damage it has done to us individually and collectively. One of the things we discussed was why, when there is plenty of evidence that physical and psychological abuse (in families, in the workplace, and in institutions) was at least as common in previous generations of our modern industrial civilization as it is today, the evidence of the trauma that abuse causes seems so much more visible today. Were previous generations just more stoic than ours in accepting this? Were they somehow more resilient, less affected by it than we are?

Michael’s view is that, in the first place, the damage done in previous generations was just as great — the extent of alcoholism, incarceration of the “mentally ill”, and the consequent abuse these previous generations have in turn inflicted on ours, all attest to that. The fact that it’s more visible today, he thinks, is due to the evolution of our society in recent generations from a “producer” society to a “consumer” society. My parents’ generation was expected to work hard and produce, and were assessed by their peers (and probably self-assessed as well) by how successful and effective they were at producing. There was considerably less tolerance for or consideration of behaviours of conspicuous consumption, or in fact any “weak”, unproductive, unexemplary or disobedient behaviour. One was expected to behave oneself, and, when one felt bad, buck it up, for the good of all.

By contrast, we are now judged largely by what we consume, and it is relatively unimportant how we came by the means to consume it (hard work, theft or inheritance). As a result, a much broader range of visible behaviour is tolerated, and responsibility for what we do and how we act has been substantially left to our discretion (or lack thereof). The “insane asylums” and hospitals for the poor have mostly been emptied and closed, their previous residents for the most part thrown into the streets. From schools to workplaces to religious observances, our culture has been socially deregulated, and the result is that our personal and collective trauma is on display, untreated (for better or worse), unconcealed and made our own personal responsibility. It is even, when sufficiently entertaining, celebrated, in an endless orgy of schadenfreude on Reality TV.

We are left to heal ourselves, and our homes and communities have now become the prisons and hospitals in which we seek to do it. Mental illness has become a huge and profitable industry for Big Pharma to exploit; giant pill-pushing corporations now relentlessly press us to “ask your doctor if X is right for you” (and challenge him or her if the answer is “no”).

Read more.

FORA.tv - The Power of Choice (Jared Diamond and Daniel McFadden)

FORA.tv posted this short video discussion with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) and Daniel McFadden from the National Geographic Weekend Live gathering.

The Power of Choice

Why do humans make decisions the way they do? And what does that mean in the context of the current threats to our species’ survival? Daniel McFadden, the 2000 Laureate in Economics Studies, whose work focuses on how people make choices and sort themselves into groups, will discuss questions of human choice and their repercussions with Nat Geo Explorer-in-Residence Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestseller Collapse, which analyzed the phenomenon of societal failure. The conversation will be moderated by National Geographic Weekend host Boyd Matson.

 The Power of Choice from National Geographic Live on FORA.tv

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award); research prizes and grants from the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies—National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Diamond's field experience includes 22 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and evolution of birds; the rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost golden fronted bowerbird; and other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist, he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology and a member of the board of directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA and Conservation International.

Daniel McFadden

Daniel Little McFadden is an econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He was the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In January 2011, Dr. McFadden was appointed the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at theUniversity of Southern California (USC), and the announcement of this appointment was published on January 10, 2011. Professor McFadden will have joint appointments at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the Department of Economics at USC College to examine fundamental problems facing the health care sector, looking specifically at how consumers make choices about health insurance and medical services.