Dolan wrote:People can like the same thing for different reasons. Inner experience of that same thing can be so different from person to person, whether or not they share the same culture, sex or some other category.
I would even say it's not the same for any 2 persons in the world. Which is why I think it's not that relevant to make such selections by culture or sex in many cases.
And the fact that you belong to another culture doesn't make you like a member of another species, obviously you share some traits which are similar across the species. For example, all kids share the same trait of playfulness (which can be found between other species too, and can sometimes make a dog enjoy playing with a bird, etc). If you give them the same game, they will go through it as a raw, playful experience, but also filtered through their cultural lens (which in humans pretty much becomes part of their nature).
Yes, like children, adults too share traits, in fact, the similarities are just as numerous, if not more numerous than the differences. And the differences where they exist are relatively small. The lens people filter it through is different per person, per family, per village/city, per region, per country, again changed by religion, sex, age, physical ability, intelligence etc. There are so many factors that you can't just boil it down to 2. The lens of people in North France is probably closer to that of people in South belgium than it is to that of people in South France, yet you would say they're both French so they have same lens. It just doesn't make sense to me.
I was referring to people who are fluent in more than just their native language. Fluency in a foreign language is hard to achieve, it takes certain personality traits and a lot of time investment and motivation. I doubt that most people can be fluent in two languages. It's just beyond any realistic expectation for average intelligence and training.
Most people only have one native language. The languages they know are languages of adjacent tribes or countries. Fluency is a range anyway, and is not used to mean the same as mastery of a language. Many people speak a language other than their native tongue well enough to communicate about complicated things with people that speak that language. For example if you look at the CEFR, b1 would be sufficient. Native speakers are c1-c2. If you look at IELTS, then 7 is sufficient, while most native speakers wouldn't even get ielts 9. Obviously you have to keep using the language in order to not lose the skill, but that's something different.
And yes I wouldn't consider regional, related cultures as part of a multicultural setting.
That's obviously convenient, when you disregard difference between regional cultures just because they're not big enough in your point of view. Plenty of countries in for example Africa, Asia and South America have different cultures within one border. Just look at India, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mali, Mauretania, Brazil, China. But also France, Spain and Turkey. You might not be able to tell the difference, but they would disagree. Sometimes they live peacefully, sometimes not.
The cultural flexibility concept is an idea I came up with. It's not yet fully developed to the point of being able to make particular, testable predictions, but maybe I will find the time to develop it slightly more.
Yeah, I can see.
Well, there is research that disagrees with your experience. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4976796/If something so basic and fundamental as pain experience can make people from two completely different cultures have markedly different emotional/empathising experiences, then how could this be the result of my own stereotypes?
Maybe I missed it, but nothing in that article says anything about openness, trust and honesty. So it's definitely your stereotype of east asia. also the differences aren't so markedly different, it seems like they're actually quite small. The conclusion also says that it's in line with some research, yet contradicts others, aka, we still don't know anything. The finding that people empathize about equally with the ingroup as they do with the outgroup and are reasonably adept at recognizing pain in other humans even from different cultures is way more interesting in my opinion. Not so different after all.
I don't dispute that cultural values and upbringing can affect a persons cognitive response. It's obvious that it can. In ww1 veterans from India had certain different ways of dealing with PTSD than English soldiers. In such a case it's relevant to an extent to understand that patient's culture in order to treat the patient. But if you had raised that same indian man in britain from the start, with a british family, he would respond like the british soldier. not like the indian one. Culture isn't rigid and static, people adapt, acquire and let go of things. A person raised for the first 20 years in culture A, who then lives for the next 40 years in culture B will mix those two cultures into his identity. And you can't know what that person acquired or dropped, so when you see that person and go oh, he's from culture A (or culture A+B), that will tell you pretty much nothing about that person unless you get know that person better and also know something about that culture.
So in most contexts, the above doesn't matter. If you hire someone to scoop ice cream, it really doesn't matter much if you know that person has .1 higher perceived pain rate for a needle entering the palm. All that matters is if that person can scoop ice cream. Knowing what someone's culture is doesn't matter when you play aoe3 with them. The reason why it doesn't matter is because it doesn't tell you much beyond generalisations, which as we have already agreed, won't necessarily tell you anything about the individual. I'm not saying it doesn't affect anyone's life, but fixating on the culture and gender instead of on the person is the wrong approach.
anyway that's it for me, I don't have time to properly write the post. we're basically talking about beliefs here anyway, so there's no point really.