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Paul D. Coverdell World Wise Schools - Culture Matters

Linking Values to Behavior

Photo of old man in Uzbekestan.

In the iceberg exercise, you saw how certain aspects or features of culture are visible-- they show up in people's behavior--while many other aspects of culture are invisible, existing only in the realms of thought, feeling, and belief. The examples in this exercise show how these two realms, the visible and the hidden, are related to each other, how the values and beliefs you cannot see affect behavior.

To understand where behavior comes from-to understand why people behave the way they do-means learning about values and beliefs. While the behavior of people from another culture may seem strange to you, it probably makes sense to them. The reason any behavior makes sense is simply because it is consistent with what a given person believes in or holds dear. Conversely, when we say that what someone has done "makes no sense," what we mean is that that action contradicts what we know that person feels or wants

In the exercise below, match the behavior in the column on the left to a value or belief in the column on the right.

Behavior Value/Belief

1. Use of understatement. a. Directness

2. Asking people to call you by your first name. b. Centrality of familly

3. Taking off from work to attend the funeral of an aunt. c. External control

4. Not helping the person next to you on an exam. d. Saving Face

5. Disagreeing openly with someone at a meeting. e. Respect for age

6. Not laying off and older worker whose performance is weak. f. Informality

7. At a meeting, agreeing with a suggestion you think is wrong. g. Deference to authority

8. Inviting the teaboy to eat lunch with you in your office. h. Indirectness

9. Asking the headmaster's opinion of something you're the expert on. i. Self-reliance

10. Accepting, without question, that something cannot be changed. j. Egalitarianism

Read how cultural values affect actions in Batteries, written by a PCV in Nepal.

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