When fundamental truths aren’t quite so fundamental

My guess is that most people reading this article are weird. In fact, probably the majority of people reading this article are WEIRD.

Before you raise an eyebrow and hit ‘delete’ and ‘unfollow’, let me explain. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Whilst millions of WEIRD people would say hang on, I’m definitely not rich, they probably live in a country that is.

Why does this matter? Lots of reasons, but the one that really made me think when I listened to Matthew Syed’s podcast was the assumption that anyone who doesn’t live in a WEIRD country must aspire to it. Mustn’t they? Democracy? Hell yeah! Industrialised? Yes please, bring on that capitalism and I can get rich if I work hard.?

Actually, no. The podcast starts off with a frankly alarming point. Most of the classical assertions that we accept as the truth about the human mind are based almost entirely on behavioural science research carried out by Western researchers in Western universities, working with (you’ve guessed it) Western subjects. And when I say based almost entirely, I mean 95% of research subjects were Western, 68% of which were from the United States, two thirds of which were undergraduate students. And Westerners make up around 15% of the global population. Hmm.

This research population kinda makes sense in one context. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that globalisation has mixed up cultures across the world to the current degree, and made connecting with people so easy. 50 years ago, most researchers in Western Universities only had access to predominantly western (and very probably white) subjects for their research. They didn’t have the resources or the network to go global. That’s changed in the twenty-first century, of course, but many of the fundamental truths that we accept about human behaviour and desires are rooted in research that was published decades ago. But… wow. Nobody thought to say ‘hey, if we had access to subjects from different cultures we might find differences in what we’re confidently putting forward as the truth about the human mind.’ Or if they did, they weren’t able to make it happen.

My interest is in equity and inclusion, a world where everyone feels welcomed and valued at school, at work, and in society. What makes people feel valued differs enormously, but we tend to approach it in a very generalised way, based on research into human motivation. One of the first things new managers learn is how to motivate their team as individuals and as a group. Whilst emphasising that managers need to know their people well enough to understand how to motivate and support them individually, global companies need the efficiency of consistent reward policies, approaches to personal development, and promotion criteria. When I studied for my CIPD qualifications many years ago, we were taught about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Vroom’s expectancy theory, Peter Drucker’s management by objectives, to name but a few. All Western thinkers, their ideas scaled up and shifted into global management thinking in the belief that what we know about the human mind is fundamentally the same everywhere.

Intercultural behavioural research has been similarly flawed. Geert Hofstede published his global cultural dimensions in 1980, but his research was carried out in one global company (IBM), mainly with blue collar workers. Like the behavioural science experiments to understand the human mind, although Hofstede had access to tens of thousands of subjects, they comprised a small, unrepresentative section of society from the many countries included in the research. Other intercultural behavioural models are based on Hofstede’s original behavioural dimensions, perpetuating this skewed perspective.??

Many years ago, I dismissed one of my team in Singapore (let’s call them AB) after unsuccessfully taking them through performance management. I spent hours coaching AB to develop the skills needed to influence and coach their client group. But AB couldn’t (I now realise) assimilate the Western thinking needed to do that. And I was blind to it. I couldn’t see it through AB’s eyes because I was equally unable to assimilate their thinking.?

Once AB had left the business, I received their exit interview comments and was a bit miffed to see that they’d marked me as a poor line manager, when I’d spent hours and many very early mornings trying my best to help them succeed. However, once I read their comments it all fell into place. “Rebecca is a poor leader”, it read. “She keeps asking me what I think I should do instead of telling me what to do.”

So my coaching conversations had not landed at all. They’d loaded up poor AB with even more stress. I assumed that AB more or less thought the way I did, and understood the purpose and power of coaching from my Western perspective. Not a bit of it. They found it bewildering, stressful and unhelpful.

We can never fully understand the perspective of people who grew up in a different country to ours, or in a different colour skin, or with a different sexual orientation. Where we know them personally, we can be guided by our experience of their behaviours and reactions to build a mutually rewarding relationship. Where we’re generalising about cultures or perspectives that are different to ours, let’s remember that everything we think we know about how the human mind works is based on the combined worldview of a limited set of people. ‘Fundamental’ truths about human behaviour may not be so fundamental after all.