Social Psychology

A Cultural Lens Changes Business Focus

MULTINATIONAL FIRMS TODAY value cultural diversity. While this appreciation of culture has been a comparative advantage for many companies, some firms have made costly mistakes with diversity programs by overemphasizing the cultural backgrounds of employees, partners, or customers, offending their intended beneficiaries by conveying a stereotypic view that individuals are mere reflections of their culture—that individuals can never see beyond their cultural lenses. 

Illustration by Michael Klein

So how can firms understand and appreciate culture without overemphasizing or stereotyping it? Research conducted by Michael Morris, GSB associate professor of organizational behavior, sheds new light on this question and uncovers how traditional ways of studying cultural influence may have misled management and marketing researchers.

Researchers have traditionally assumed that individuals internalize culture in the form of basic personality traits or value orientations. “Those who take this approach assume the ‘lens of culture’ is like a permanent contact lens implanted in your eyes in childhood, which then continually and pervasively affects what you see,” says Morris, who is a leading researcher in psychology.

In contrast, Morris’s approach, rooted in cognitive and social psychology, emphasizes the dynamics of when culture switches on and off. His model of culture as knowledge assumes that an individual’s cultural lenses are “more like sunglasses—tools that you carry around with you but which shape your perceptions only when they are put into use.” Yet, this does not imply that individuals can deliberately control the influence of their culture. “Cultural knowledge structures automatically activate under certain conditions to filter information from the world that the individual processes,” says Morris. “They act more like sunglasses that automatically darken when you walk into the sunlight.”

This begs the question, what causes one’s cultural lenses to kick in? Morris and his research colleagues set out to address this through experiments on perception, decision making, and conflict resolution at the Business School’s Behavioral Research Laboratory and at parallel facilities abroad. Results, consistent with what psychologists have long known, showed that when people are busy or distracted, they rely on prior knowledge to filter out details of a problem. Morris found that under these conditions, cultural differences were magnified: When solving managerial problems, U.S. participants tended to emphasize priorities of individuals, while Hong Kong participants tended to emphasize priorities of groups.

Another cultural trigger was uncovered in studies Morris conducted with Business School marketing professor Itamar Simonson and Donnel Briley, PhD ’97, now assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These studies found that when decision makers are required to articulate a defense for their decisions, their choices are shaped by cultural knowledge.

In recent work with Business School researcher Hoying Fu, Morris has studied a more intriguing triggering condition. Cultural knowledge is more likely to be activated in an individual’s mind when it has been “primed” by recent reminders of one’s culture. Priming is at work “when an American manager living abroad sees a John Wayne movie and then, without intending to, thinks about the next problem he encounters in more American terms,” Morris says.

While the psychology of priming reveals that people can be manipulated through their culture, it also reveals how they retain some control over the influence of culture. People engage in active self-priming all the time. Expatriates surround themselves with reminders of their homeland—cuisine, music, pictures, movies—so as not to forget their distinctive cultural feelings and habits.

At the negotiation table, the notion of priming has enormous implications: Differing outcomes in negotiations can be engineered by setting the right atmosphere, since the environment determines which cultural “script” for negotiation will shape the outcome. For instance, Japanese scripts allow for more ambiguity in the settlement of a deal, so “if you’re an American firm exploring a joint venture with a Japanese firm, and you prefer a relatively ambiguous contract, then you should meet your counterparts in a Japanese setting, which will trigger Japanese scripts,” Morris says.

Although people cannot control the cognitive process that activates their cultural lenses, they can control the conditions that determine whether culture will kick in. By understanding these dynamics, firms can more effectively respond to cultural differences in their customers, employees, and competitors.

—Helen K. Chang

How Does Culture Influence Conflict Resolution? A Dynamic Constructivist Analysis, Michael W. Morris and Ho-ying Fu, GSB Research Paper #1649, October 2000 
Reasons as Carriers of Culture: Dynamic vs. Dispositional Models of Cultural Influence on Decision Making, Donnel A. Briley, Michael W. Morris, and Itamar Simonson, Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 27), September 2000