Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / If we come from different cultures, do we FEEL the same? With prof. Batja Mesquita

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If we come from different cultures, do we FEEL the same? With prof. Batja Mesquita · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Athea Mosquita is a social psychologist and effective scientist and a pioneer of cultural
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  psychology. She's a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and
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  director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven. Today
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  we're going to be talking about her groundbreaking book called Between Us, How Cultures Create
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  Emotions. Professor Mosquita, welcome to the show.
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  Thank you, Athea, for having me.
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  Your ideas have a particular resonance with me. We had a really short chat before I pressed
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  record because I'm from the Balkans originally, but I lived in Germany for almost 10 years.
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  However, as if that wasn't challenging enough, I upped the ante and moved to Japan about
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  a year and a half ago. Say what you will about the Germans and Germany, and people do say
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  a lot, particularly on social media. There's a lot of funny memes, things like the brutal
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  directness of Germans or the scary German stare when you're riding the U-Bahn. But
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  at least I was still embedded in a European cultural context. Now I'm not anymore. So
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  I'm going to try my best to not turn this interview into a manual for my personal use.
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  Although maybe I should just do that. We'll see. We'll see where it goes. But in any
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  case, what we should definitely do at the beginning is define what emotions are. Because
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  I always thought, you know, it's pretty simple. It's pretty basic. Emotions are just feelings
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  and those should be universal. But your work suggests it might be a bit more complicated
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  than that.
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  Yeah. I mean, apart from the fact that that would be circular, right? We're talking about
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  emotions and then we're saying they're feelings. That's just another word. But I think when
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  I wouldn't pretend that I have the definition of emotions, in part because there is no definition
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  of emotions. Scientists don't agree on it and lay people in different cultures don't
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  agree on what emotions are exactly. But what we can agree on, I think, is that we talk
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  about emotions when we have responses to situations that are not habitual, that are not common.
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  So something unusual happens, something that I need to tend to. It can be something bad,
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  like this was not what I wanted or this was not what I expected. Or it can be something
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  good. This is really what I want or it's what I have been working for. And that usually
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  relates to negative and positive emotions. So that's what I mean. I'm just observing
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  that when we talk about emotions, that usually the category of psychological reactions that
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  we're talking about.
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  Psychological reactions. We had this psychology class in high school for a year and I remember
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  this page on emotions in our textbook. It was actually a series of photographs, portraits
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  of actors displaying various emotional states.
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  Yeah. It was really reassuring, right? We just knew which-
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  It's so simple. Things were so simple back then.
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  Yeah.
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  That there were descriptions of physical changes on each face. For example, lowered eyebrows
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  meant anger, wide eyes meant shock or something. But the main thing I remember is that those
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  expressions of emotions were supposed to be universally understood across cultures. That,
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  for example, wide eyes paired, I don't know, with an open mouth always and everywhere signifies
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  shock. Is that not the case?
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  Well, there are many things to say about that. I mean, the short answer is no, that's not
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  the case. One is that when you are surprised or shocked or afraid, you don't always look
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  that way. That's not true in European or Western cultures. It's not true anywhere. Those faces
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  were carefully selected to match a certain prototype. The other thing is that if you
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  ask people spontaneously what those faces mean, they actually don't use those words.
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  It really, even in Western cultures, it really only is when you give them a choice between
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  five or six emotion words that they say, okay, well, if it has to be one of those, I think
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  this is the closest. Then they do reasonably well, which is to say above chance, and they
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  make mistakes as you would expect them. For example, there's only one positive emotion
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  in that row, in that list of words, which is happiness, and they can match the happy
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  face with the happy words. Probably what, I mean, we don't know exactly, there are different
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  ideas about what faces really mean. It's not to say that faces have no expression or not.
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  We can't read anything about faces. What we know is some of what faces say is just, is
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  it good or bad? We also know that even the good or bad can change when we see those faces
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  in a different environment. The same face can look as happy or sad, depending on in
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  what context you put it. Psychologists have done experiments in which they show that a
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  face can go from disgust to happiness, depending on the situation that is either depicted or
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  described. Then across cultures, there are even more differences in that the further
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  away you are from a Western culture, the lower the recognition rate is. It probably means
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  that there is something that faces express, but it's not emotions. That's the most likely.
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  Some people say, for example, that some of the facial expressions have this kind of a
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  Darwinian explanation that they're associated with functions. When I'm surprised or afraid,
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  I have my eyes wide open. Well, probably because in both cases, you need more information.
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  It's not always that you're surprised and you have your big eyes open, but the other
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  way around, when you have your eyes wide open and you're surprised, it could be because
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  you want to have more information. You want to let the stimuli come in. The simple idea
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  of six universal emotions that are neatly communicated by these six different displays
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  that we can universally recognize, no, that's not true.
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  The context in which a face appears does make a lot of sense. If you're watching a scary
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  movie and they do make this shock, horror face, whatever, you immediately go, okay,
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  of course, because they're scared. If I think about it, if that same expression would appear
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  in a different setting, it could mean something completely else.
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  Yeah, and it does. We have research showing that it does, that the same faces can be interpreted
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  in very different ways, depending on a different context.
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  That's already a little bit shocking to me, which is a good sign. I listened to another
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  interview you did and you said, for example, that anger is not just a feeling, but also
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  something that happens between two people. What did you mean by this, something that
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  happens?
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  I would say in all cultures, we would say that anger, it's intuitive, I think, that
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  anger is not just a feeling inside me, but that if I'm angry, that affects our relationship,
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  right? Especially when I'm angry at you, you understand that something is going to happen.
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  My anger is a way of saying, I don't accept this. I think you're to be blamed and I don't
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  accept this. It's probably also a good predictor of that if you don't change your behavior,
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  that I'm going to do something that makes it very clear that I don't accept it.
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  I would say that anger is not always equally effective or it's not always interpreted in
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  exactly the same way, but it certainly has an interpersonal aspect in it. That's true.
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  We find that in psychological research done in Western countries, like if I'm angry and
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  I'm negotiating with you, then you as a negotiator are more likely to give me a better bit than
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  if I'm not angry and if I'm neutral. If I'm happy, actually, you think, oh, the bit could
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  be a little lower. We certainly take interpersonal messages from anger, even in Western cultures.
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  But in many cultures, that's actually the primary way in which people look at emotions
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  is what happens in this emotional episode between people. In many culture, the emotion
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  of anger is defined in terms of what it does between people and the feeling is secondary.
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  Not to say that people don't feel something, but the real important thing is that something
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  is happening between people.
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  More like in a functional sense, less in like I'm feeling a certain way sort of sense.
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  Yeah, or more, you could say that. You could also say it's more an interpersonal than an
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  subjective or individual event.
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  Let's be a bit more exact. Let's say that I'm a European working in Europe and I'm
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  angry at my boss. At the same time, there's also a Japanese man in Japan who's angry at
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  his boss. Now, understand that the expressions of anger might be different in these two cases,
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  but are we feeling the same thing?
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  Yeah, there's a lot of presuppositions here. For example, I hope you'll indulge me.
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  Yeah. For example, that the Japanese guy is angry at his boss, that would be very unusual
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  actually. Because in order to be angry, you have to understand that, or you have to suppose
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  that you're deserving something more than you're getting, that you're entitled, and
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  that you are in a position to not accept, and that you can do that in this very direct way.
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  So does the Japanese, I wouldn't even say that I would know exactly what you felt if
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  you were another European worker who was angry at their boss. I mean, a lot of considerations
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  go into that feeling of being angry. Do you think it's really unfair? Are you just frustrated?
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  Do you think your boss is a pushover? Or do you think that you will face retributions?
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  So all of those things are going to go into the angry feeling. But now, if I'm Japanese,
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  I think first of all, I think that angry is an immature and bad emotion.
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  Especially when you're not in a power position and defend the norms. I mean, when you're
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  angry, you are certainly concerned that you will violate or that you will threaten the harmony.
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  And you may wonder, and that's what a lot of people that we included in our research did,
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  you may wonder what you have done wrong, that your boss did this. So a lot of,
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  I'm not saying Japanese are never angry. They are. Sometimes they are. But it comes with all these
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  other considerations. And then I think, once you're there, it's not just they're angry just like us,
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  and then they're expressing a difference. There are all these reasons why Japanese might not be
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  angry like we are. And then even when they are, they probably won't express it.
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  Wow. It's interesting that in the book, you point out that an important aspect of what you're
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  talking about is the fact that in different cultures, we have different value systems,
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  like you just said, when it comes to emotions. And probably the most fascinating of those is shame,
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  which in the West is usually seen as the Satan of emotions. The mantra usually goes that in order
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  to achieve mental well-being, you have to liberate yourself from any sense of shame.
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  However, in other cultures, and again, Japan comes to mind, you say shame is much more,
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  almost like a desirable emotion. Can you break that down a little bit?
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  Yeah. So in many cultures, so let me first break down. I think the reason that shame is so bad in
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  Western cultures, I think, is that because it does two things that we don't like. One is it
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  threatens our self-esteem and our dignity is based on what we think about ourselves,
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  of our internal value. And the other is it makes clear that we're dependent on other people's
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  judgment and we don't like that either. Now in cultures where other people's judgments
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  are foregrounded anyway, where your value is always in the eyes of other people and where
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  you want to really accommodate or look good according to the norms and the roles that I
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  shared. Well, first of all, shame tells other people that you are aware of those norms and
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  that you care about being a good person in this system. And shame probably also has different
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  consequences in that other people accept you for it, that it's a good thing to ask. So I think
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  in the case of shame, there are many, many cultures in which shame is a good thing that
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  needs to be taught to kids and that make kids well-behaved, knowing their position in the
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  hierarchy, knowing their role. And so they're included rather than excluded. It's a sign of
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  inclusion if you can feel shame. Speaking of the West, we have this strong belief that every
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  emotion has to be expressed, the height of self-actualization and also health is if I'm
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  expressing myself fully at all times, at least as much as I can. And if I'm always authentic to
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  myself, this kind of language. Would you say that that is a universal ideal that we should all be
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  striving for no matter which culture we belong to? No, that also seems to be related to the idea
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  that it's very important to be an authentic self and that the focus is on the self. We don't know
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  exactly why it doesn't work that way. We know that if Western people suppress their emotions,
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  that there are, that they feel them more strongly. We have some research that shows that
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  they have that physiological reactions become stronger, that people make a lot of effort and
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  that it's exhausting to suppress your emotions. And also some evidence that people who suppress
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  their emotions a lot have less satisfying relationships and are less liked. Right. And
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  we're talking about Westerners right now. But here we're talking about Westerners.
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  Yeah. None of that. So this was the setup of saying that none of that we find with, for example,
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  Asians or Asian Americans. So we don't find that people who suppress their emotions feel their
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  emotions more intensely. We don't find that it has any negative effect on their relationship.
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  We don't find that it's exhausting or effortful. So we don't find the kind of burnout that you
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  find in Western populations where there's a lot of suppression. We don't find that in Asian
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  populations. And we can only assume that it's either because the effect itself of not feeling
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  authentic is bad. That could be one of the reasons that suppression is a bad thing. Or you can say
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  that maybe just practicing suppressing makes it effortless. So we don't really know what the
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  underlying system is. We only know that this idea that you have to express emotions doesn't seem to
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  hold true for a lot of other cultures. It's not at all. It's actually unclear whether it always
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  holds true for Western cultures either. I mean, we also have the sayings of count till 10 until
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  your anger is gone. And we don't really have evidence that people count to 10 then explode.
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  We have the evidence that sometimes that works. So I would say it's a little simplistic even in a
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  Western context to say that suppression always hurts. But we do have quite a bit of evidence
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  that it can hurt suppressing emotions. And we have very little evidence actually in some other
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  other cultural context. Well, that is blowing my mind right now. I think at least in like common
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  parlance, you would actually assume that somebody who's not authentically expressing their emotions
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  is there's something that they have like a duplicitous nature or maybe there's bad intentions
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  in an extreme case, you would call this person a sociopath, like adjusting their emotional response
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  or whatever to the situation. So it's actually the inverse. I think what is interesting about that
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  is this idea that an emotion exists kind of like the movie Inside Out. The emotion is already formed
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  inside you and then you decide to not express it. And that's very inauthentic because it lives in
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  your head. Yeah. And I think there is an alternative to thinking about your emotions as living inside
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  into your head, which is that emotions are a process of meaning making. And so it's not that
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  the emotion of anger is there right away, but you think, oh, I don't like this. And then you say,
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  I deserve better. And then you say, I guess that person should have given me that. And then you say,
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  no, I should really, you know, I should claim this. So the idea is that if this is all the steps
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  in context and in a relationship that ultimately amount to a feeling or an interpretation of the
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  world that we call angry, then in each of those steps, something else could be happening. And so
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  that's what I think happens in many other cultures that I don't like this. Okay. Maybe I don't like
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  it, but that's not anger, right? You could also say, what did I do wrong that this interaction
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  is going off paths or off route? What can I do something? You know, why would this person
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  think this about me? So I think that the meaning making in context, also the cues that you get from
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  other people know you should be angry. You deserve this. You know, this can all be different in
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  different cultures, the kind of the scripts that are available to you. Are you thinking about what
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  happens to you all the time in, I'm entitled to this, or do you think, okay, this is fate.
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  I might've liked it differently, but God wanted this for me or whatever, or fate wanted this for
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  me, or sometimes things go well, sometimes they don't go well. I mean, each of those interpretations
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  of the world amounts or doesn't amount to building up anger. And I think that's how you have to think
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  about emotions to understand that, no, it doesn't have to be inauthentic to not feel angry. It can
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  just be a matter of a different interpretation of a different focus of different cues in the environment
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  of different habits of coming to terms with things that you don't like. And so if you think about it,
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  then there is not really an authentic emotion. There may be an emotion that you've become used to,
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  there may be in habitual ways of interpreting certain events, but it's not like one habitual
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  way of interpreting events is necessarily more authentic than another.
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  So do emotions even exist without culture then? For example, I don't know if you found
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  one of these unfortunate wolf children in the woods or something, there were a couple of cases
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  in history. Would you recognize their emotional states as anger, fear, et cetera, happiness,
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  or not?
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  The thing is that if you grew up with anger and fear, you might recognize it in them.
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  Because we recognize those in our pets, in our cats and dogs, or our guinea pigs.
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  That doesn't mean they have them in the same way as we do. So do they have it in the same way?
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  I would say not because part of the emotions that we have are the connotations, the associations
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  that we have. Is there anything emotional about us if we don't grow up in a culture? Yes, for sure.
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  Whether you want to call that an emotion or not is also a matter of definition and agreement.
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  We usually don't. But you could say we're all equipped to like certain things and not like
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  other things. We're all equipped. Even bacteria can move towards the light and nutrition and can
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  move away from toxic environments. So is that an emotion? I would say not. But are we equipped with
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  liking or coming up recognizing our concerns? Yes, for sure. What is the level of distinction
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  that we can make when we don't have language, when we don't have culture, when we don't have
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  other people to help us interpret? The kids who are raised by the wolves do not speak a language.
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  I don't know the literature so precisely, but I think they lose their ability to learn a language
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  in the way that kids who grow up with parents do. So yeah, our nervous system is being developed
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  in a cultural environment in the proximity of other people who help us interpret what the world
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  is like and so who are important in forming our emotions or our emotional habits. Okay, just to
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  pick up on this repressing emotions thing a little bit, because I am a hypochondriac, I will admit
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  that. And there's quite a few clips doing the rounds on social media of famous healthcare
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  professionals claiming that negative emotions, if pended, are not a part of the world. So I think
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  claiming that negative emotions, if pent up and if left unexpressed, particularly anger again,
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  can lead to physical diseases like bad ones like multiple sclerosis, cancer, etc. But then how come
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  in cultures where expressing anger is not a desirable thing? Again, we talked about Japan,
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  presumably people are doing it less than they're not just dropping that all over the place.
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  How do we square up the two? It's worse than that. Negative emotions actually don't predict a whole
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  number of health outcomes that they do predict in US samples. So there again, we know that there is
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  no association between negative emotions and a whole series of health outcomes in Japan, for
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  example. We don't know exactly why, but one of the reasons could be that is the meaning that
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  is the meaning that emotions have. If it's true that we define ourselves by emotions,
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  then having negative emotions by internal feelings, then having negative internal feelings
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  may be more consequential. So it may be more a meta-effect of what we think about those emotions
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  or what the effect is of those emotions in our interpersonal life, in our personal life,
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  than the emotions themselves. Yeah, no. People do not drop that. There are many ways to be a human
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  being. What I think is happening is cultures help individuals to regulate their bodily system.
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  They do that in different ways. One way is through the language of emotion and in the
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  regulation of emotions. That's a very Western system. What we see is that people in different
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  cultures don't talk about their emotions in the same way, don't experience them in the same way,
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  don't express them in the same way. So the question is, I think a fairer question would be,
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  what are the ways in which those cultures help their individuals regulate their bodies?
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  I have an idea. For example, we co-construct, in a lot of cultures, people co-construct situations
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  that keep them in balance. In a lot of cultures, situations are less left to the, the lives are
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  less left to the initiative of individuals than in Western contemporary societies. So it may well be
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  that cultural regulations also occurs through no prescribing roles, through having more predictable
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  interpersonal relationships, more scripts, and less through subjective emotion regulation.
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  But that's, I mean, that's me guessing, having a hunch. But I don't think that we all have
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  emotions in the same way. I don't think that that's unnatural.
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  So it's actually more about what sort of meaning do I ascribe to certain emotions? So hypothetically,
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  would it be possible for me to retrain myself? Let's take the example of shame. And I see shame
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  in a negative light and I have negative feelings about it. But if I train myself through manipulation,
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  whatever, and suddenly saw shame in a positive light, would I be able to actually flourish while
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  feeling shame? I think you can learn, you can certainly learn to, I mean, that's what we do
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  with people who are excessively angry, for example, or kids who are excessively angry. We try to tell
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  them that there are other ways of achieving their goals. We try to tell them that it's not so
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  positive. I'm sure that some of the feelings of shame can be trained over time. But what you have
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  to realize is that the fact that it's learnable doesn't mean that you have, you know, that with
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  this snap of your finger that you have relearned experiences that you have had for a whole life.
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  And the other part that you're mentioning is true too, is that we live in an environment where shame
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  has a certain meaning. So you cannot buy yourself all independent from your environment, change the
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  meaning of shame completely. You can try to move it, you can try to convince other people about it.
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  You can, as societies change, I mean, the cultural meaning of those emotions do change over time.
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  It's not a fixed entity. We know that the meaning of certain emotions does change over time. We have
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  historians describing that process. So it's not fixed. But is it learning, is it just by saying
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  to yourself, from now on I'm going to see shame as a pro-social emotion, good luck. That's not so easy.
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  Right.
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  But you can try to, I mean, it certainly has helped me to see the other side of shame. And
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  there are philosophers, for example, who say, in Western cultures, we could use a little more of
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  the shame of, say, caring about what other people think about you or how you could improve yourself.
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  And we could use a little less of the anger of what I'm entitled to. And that would make us maybe
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  a better society. I'm a psychologist, so I just describe. But you can certainly second guess
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  the meaning of those emotions and try to understand what they mean for other people. And I think that
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  realizing that they can have that different meaning does change something in the experience
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  of your own emotions. But it doesn't change overnight. Something that you've learned for 30,
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  40, 50, 60 years isn't going to disappear because you think about it once in a different way.
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  That's a lifelong experience. But experiences are being, you know, people continue to have
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  new experiences. So this could be one of them.
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  Yeah. Even if I succeeded, I mean, and became like completely shameless and thought it was a
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  good thing, I would create an outcast of myself, like an eccentric at the best and like a total
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  outcast in society.
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  I don't know that there's any culture where people are shameless, because it's a very social
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  emotion. But there are cultures where shame is given a place and seen as something positive for
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  society. And there are cultures where shame is really not giving a positive place, where it's
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  only considered to be dysfunctional. And I think, you know, many Western societies are closer to the
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  dysfunctional view. And I don't think that's completely right. I mean, shame has clear
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  functions because it keeps you committed to the norms. I mean, if I didn't have shame, I would
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  walk around naked if it were warm and scream, you know, I'm going to be a little bit of a
• 32:44
  wimp and scream at the top of my lungs. I wouldn't be any, I wouldn't consider the opinions of
• 32:52
  others. And so shame makes me the social person that I am. But I think, yeah, in terms of how
• 33:01
  positive or negative is it or how much does it reflect, how negatively or positively does it
• 33:07
  reflect on the person who feels it? I think it can be different cross culturally and also between
• 33:14
  individuals. It's also really interesting when you said about, you know, this kind of maxim in the
• 33:20
  West, you shouldn't care about what other people think. We grew up with that kind of like the
• 33:24
  ultimate badass was a person who didn't care what anybody else thinks. And you thought this person
• 33:31
  has no problems at all, you know. And now that I've grown up a little bit, it doesn't sound like
• 33:39
  the best advice out there to be honest, because how do you not care about what people that you
• 33:45
  care about or that you love think? I mean, that's that you'll probably be a psychopath.
• 33:49
  Yes, exactly. That's the definition of a psychopath. Exactly. So most people, when we say we don't
• 33:58
  feel shame, I mean, some sociologists say it's the unstated emotion. It's like it's what everybody
• 34:05
  try even in Western cultures. It's the emotion that everybody tries to avoid, tries to avoid coming
• 34:12
  to the foreground. But everybody has shame constantly shame or embarrassment constantly.
• 34:20
  And that's how we keep our interactions normal. Of course we care. I mean, if we didn't care about
• 34:25
  each other, there would be no relationship, no socially appropriate behavior. So that's the
• 34:33
  absolute definition of a human being is that we care about others. And we couldn't live without
• 34:39
  caring about others or without being part of a social community. So really shame is what we
• 34:45
  absolutely need to live in groups. It's what we absolutely we don't we want to avoid it from being
• 34:52
  too big and too painful. But exactly that's the motivation that shame gives us. And so it's, you
• 35:00
  know, one of the ways of saying shame is the ultimate social emotions that makes us into
• 35:07
  social beings. So we couldn't live without it. And if we do, we end up in prison or hurting a lot of
• 35:15
  people. Otherwise, that's an extremely refreshing take. Speaking of caring about others. Once again,
• 35:22
  I want to turn to a specific emotion. It's a big one love. Again, in the West, we've been brought
• 35:26
  up with this very specific idea of romantic love, usually personified in romantic comedies we all
• 35:33
  watched in Disney movies, where each person has a soulmate wandering out there. And once you find
• 35:39
  this person, you're going to live out the rest of your days together with the same intensity of
• 35:43
  romantic and sexual emotions. If you don't, something's wrong. You know, you failed.
• 35:48
  I'm guessing that's also quite a specific interpretation of love. That's not a given
• 35:54
  everywhere around the world. Well, it's an interpretation of love that doesn't really
• 35:59
  align with the facts, even in middle class. Yeah. But still apart from that, yeah, there are many,
• 36:10
  in many places of the world, that's not how people think about it. There's not a special
• 36:15
  person, I think. I can say a few things about it. One is that in many cultures of the world,
• 36:26
  romantic love doesn't coincide with love, right? There are arranged marriages still in many places
• 36:33
  of the world. And there's actually no evidence that those marriages do worse than
• 36:38
  marriages that start out with romantic love. So that's a way of looking at love, is you care about
• 36:45
  another person. You live your life together. There's also many cultures where love is less of
• 36:54
  a strong individual feeling and more of what you do with each other, how you show it to each other.
• 37:01
  But then there are a lot of cultures, and I think that's what you're referring to, where
• 37:06
  they're not so much focused on love in the way of finding somebody very special, but love in the way
• 37:17
  of being sad for them if things don't work out. In many cultures, the word for love is the same
• 37:24
  word as for empathy and as for sadness. And so that's a very different kind of love than the
• 37:32
  love that goes with, let's say, extreme happiness. It's not what you feel for somebody whom you
• 37:39
  selected because they're so special, but it's the feeling you have for somebody you're related to
• 37:46
  and for whom you're responsible to some extent. And then the other thing that I want to say is
• 37:51
  that the obsession with love, I mean, everybody is in love with it. And so it's not just the
• 38:00
  love. I mean, everybody, of course, in all societies, people know something like love.
• 38:06
  I'm sure that mothers do something for their children and want them to stay alive. But what
• 38:12
  form that takes is very different. So first, there is the feeling of love. This child is very special
• 38:20
  and there's the feeling of love. You don't want them to feel sad, but you feel sad for them because
• 38:25
  they know what life is going to bring to them. And then there are cultures where there's just
• 38:31
  less focus on love and more focus on, because we're all related anyway, more focus on what can go
• 38:38
  wrong in relationships. So a lot of focus on envy, a lot of focus on what might happen if people
• 38:45
  close to you hate you, if they're your enemies. So the idea that love is the ultimate emotion and
• 38:53
  the emotion towards which societies are geared is a very modern Western idea that is adopted by some
• 39:03
  industrializing countries to some extent, but is far from universal as the main focus of emotional
• 39:14
  life. The world is becoming more global and more multicultural than ever. And with it, there's going
• 39:20
  to be more and more intercultural relationships. What advice would you give to people finding
• 39:25
  themselves in one of these? This is going to be advice for me basically, to kind of minimize the
• 39:31
  frequency of sort of emotional lost in translation moments that can cause friction.
• 39:39
  I think seeking translation is the right approach. So one of the things that I'm trying to say in the
• 39:48
  book is that we need to be humble, that it's good to think that all of the things that we talked
• 39:54
  about, that okay, this is, you know, suppressing your emotion may not feel good for you, but maybe
• 40:01
  there's nothing wrong with it for another person. Maybe you have to be angry in one culture, but
• 40:06
  there's nothing wrong about never being angry in another culture. And I think to be humble and
• 40:12
  recognize that it could be very different for different people is the first step. Second step
• 40:20
  that is related to it is that your own emotions are cultured as well. Just because I feel them
• 40:26
  doesn't mean that they're universal. And then I think the way I would approach is be curious
• 40:34
  and try to understand what another person feels, does, how they see the situation,
• 40:43
  what it means to them, what kind of an emotion they would self-ascribe or would describe in you.
• 40:50
  Is that a bad or a good emotion to them? How do they think it would work out if they had that?
• 40:56
  All of those things, I think we should be on a path of discovery rather than thinking that we
• 41:05
  know what another person will feel like. And I think that's the best advice that at this point
• 41:12
  I can give to people who have, which is all of us at this point, have cross intercultural relationships.
• 41:20
  So being humble and staying curious.
• 41:23
  Yes.
• 41:23
  Basically. All right.
• 41:24
  That would be a very nice summary. Yes.
• 41:28
  Sounds simple, maybe deceptively simple because it's not probably that easy.
• 41:31
  Deceptively simple. I've been trying my whole life. Yes. Deceptively simple.
• 41:36
  Right. One tendency that I noticed while living in Japan is that I want to maybe,
• 41:43
  I don't want to generalize, but I do notice it in other foreigners as well,
• 41:47
  is that we want to talk everything out. We want to articulate everything that we feel and
• 41:52
  clear the air with words, et cetera. And my Japanese friends say that reading the room
• 41:59
  is very important to them. I was going to say that. Reading the room instead of clearing the air.
• 42:03
  Exactly. So I'm at a loss here because I don't have this skill as much as they do because
• 42:10
  I come from another culture. And I think reading the room is probably a beneficial thing for
• 42:16
  everybody in a multicultural society. Could you give us some advice?
• 42:21
  Yeah. Some advice there maybe as well?
• 42:25
  Well, I mean, the way I understand the Japanese reading the room is that you really try to think
• 42:34
  from the perspective of another person, but really from the perspective, what would they
• 42:39
  want? What would they feel? How can I anticipate? How can I make myself, how can I accommodate so
• 42:47
  that it's closer to what they would want? And in a way, that's the opposite from the Western idea of
• 42:57
  let me tell you what I want so that you can satisfy my needs.
• 43:02
  And so I think, I don't think that's an easy skill, but a skill that you can train yourself on is
• 43:11
  it's a very different approach. And we, for example, we have done interviews with Japanese
• 43:19
  couples and Belgian couples and asked them, when you have conflict, how do you think that should be
• 43:27
  approached? And Japanese do say, you should avoid it as much as possible. Should read the room,
• 43:34
  should read, accept differences, try to anticipate what the other person wants.
• 43:42
  And Belgium say, you need to engage in conflicts, speak your mind, and start talking about it.
• 43:52
  Very different approach. And all I can say is that a little bit more of
• 43:57
  trying to read the other instead of expressing yourself might fit in the road to discovery.
• 44:09
  Are we talking about empathy here or are we talking about something else?
• 44:15
  So in my book, I take issue with the word empathy because it can mean that I try to imagine what you
• 44:24
  I try to imagine myself in your skin, and then I try to imagine what I would need.
• 44:33
  I think empathy is hard interculturally because I may try to imagine you, myself in your skin,
• 44:40
  but I'm not you. I come with different cultural preferences, expectations. And so I think it's
• 44:50
  a little more than empathy. Anthropologists sometimes call it resonance. I'm trying to
• 44:55
  find out what is important for you, and I'm trying to find out, given what's important to you,
• 45:03
  what you would feel and want and do in this situation and what I could do.
• 45:10
  So it's a little more complicated, I think, than mere empathy.
• 45:13
  Last question, Professor. What about humor? Trying to make people laugh. Do you think that's
• 45:20
  universal? Because I like to attempt to crack a few jokes here and there, usually unsuccessfully,
• 45:28
  but I want some sort of reassurance that it's worth my while to keep trying, even if I'm in a
• 45:35
  different cultural context. I think that's a little bit of a challenge.
• 45:40
  Even if I'm in a different cultural context. Do you think that will work or I'm just going to
• 45:47
  embarrass myself further? Yeah, I was going to ask you what your experience is. I haven't done any
• 45:52
  research on it, but usually humor works with pushing some boundaries. But of course, it's
• 45:59
  easier when you agree on what the boundaries are or when you agree on the normal. So I think in the
• 46:06
  best case scenario, it appeals to some commonly human expectations and then it will fly.
• 46:19
  In the worst possible scenario, you cross the boundaries that others set and that could work
• 46:26
  out very badly for you. And somewhere in between it could just fall flat. But do I think laughing
• 46:36
  is a good thing? Yeah, I do. Do I think that we can always know what people in other cultures
• 46:43
  find laughable? I found that moving to the United States at the time, I found it one of the
• 46:51
  last things that I learned. I did not think that the standup comedians were funny for
• 46:56
  probably a good eight years or so. But keep trying. Until I burn all the bridges. Learn
• 47:09
  from mistakes, I would say. Right. That's the important bit. I'm a particular fan of self-deprecating
• 47:16
  dry humor and I did find that that gets completely lost in translation because I'm going to say that
• 47:23
  I was such a stupid idiot at that time. And my Japanese friends will be like,
• 47:27
  no, why are you saying that about yourself? Don't disparage yourself. They're going to be
• 47:33
  concerned for me. And I'm like, no, no, I wasn't trying to actually be disparaging to myself. I'm
• 47:39
  trying to lay it on for comedic purposes, but it doesn't work that way. So yeah, that was my
• 47:47
  experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Humor is a hard thing to translate, but it's, yeah,
• 47:57
  keep trying and report back, I would say. Okay. All right. That would be awesome if I
• 48:03
  feature in one of your research papers. Professor, thank you so much for taking the time. Where can
• 48:08
  people find your book and do you have any social media where you're active, where people can see
• 48:13
  what you're up to these days? Yes, I have all social media and my website is bachamaskita.com.
• 48:26
  All right. And the book they can find there. I mean, it's available anywhere, Amazon bookshops,
• 48:35
  stores. It is available anywhere because- Yes, please go ahead. It has been translated
• 48:43
  in Japanese. Yeah, that's how I actually learned about your work is that I was walking around a
• 48:50
  Japanese bookstore and I saw your book prominently featured. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In
• 48:56
  the non-fiction section. Okay. And it immediately called for me and I was like, well, she's going
• 49:01
  to write. So yeah, it indeed is available. Okay. In Japan. Okay. Professor Miskito, thank you so
• 49:08
  much. It was fascinating. Thank you, Sasa. Please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube follow on
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• 49:18
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• 49:23
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• 49:29
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