umeu wrote: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.
Except that it is. There are so many things at which men and women differ substantially. Substantially as in the binary difference between 1 and 0. Here's an example of a paper which summarises some of the findings on empathy differences:
https://www.academia.edu/8530127/Empath ... d_behaviorReally just run a search on "sexual dimorphism in humans", because I think anything I will say, any evidence I will bring you will just dismiss and say it's not significant. It's almost as if sex is just an accident of biology, in your view, it plays almost no role whatsoever. We just happened to get it by chance. So frankly, I don't know if you have such beliefs because your political beliefs trump any empirical evidence you're presented with or if you simply don't understand the significance of this research. It's possible that since I've read research for years, I'm more familiar with how significant even "small differences" can be, in the bigger scheme of things. Or maybe your political worldview couldn't cope with the empirical reality or significance of these facts, no idea.
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.
Then why do you think adults are legally responsible while kids aren't? Jeez, if kids and adults are so similar then they should be equally legally responsible. But no, let's just make any difference as insignificant as possible, to the point that we're all wondering why do we even have different legal status. Not to mention sexual status, since kids who haven't gone through puberty are simply missing that hormonal activation phase that makes adults adults. Yeah, just a little small insignificant detail that has no bearing whatsoever on things. We're all THE SAME, men and women, dogs and worms, kids and adults, it's all one giant phylogenetic kumbaya on this planet.
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.
Most people do not know 2 languages, period. I lived in a few countries until now and most people in every country I've been to don't know any other language besides their own native one. Provide evidence to the contrary if you have it. Knowing a few words doesn't quite qualify someone as a speaker of another language. You need some basic level of fluency to actually be able to converse meaningfully with someone from another culture. And you also need to actively seek to communicate with someone from another country or culture. And that's just not the case for the huge majority of people from each country and culture. Their everyday life simply doesn't include contact with foreigners and regular communication in another language with them.
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.
It's not really the same. I would say that multiculturalism in the modern sense is always an artificial product of globalisation. I would call multicultural a country in which the majority of people originate in completely different cultural areas, cultures that are not directly related. Not China or Russia. Cultures that lived in proximity don't quite form a multicultural setting. Not only because they influenced each other and may be partially related but because they had centuries at their disposal to get used to their proximity, so they either solved the issue of vicinity by indifference or amplified it politically into a conflict. But there's nothing in such a neighbouring setting that was created by globalism, like in a multicultural society such as the USA.
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.
It was in the context of discussing differences in empathy and other emotional reactions that I brought up this paper. The study was about the emotional reaction to pain, which is very relevant to the subject of empathy.
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.
I think I made one long post on this subject, when I quoted the papers on how Asians and Western Europeans tend to process geometrical shapes differently. The difference also seems to have been at least partially inborn, as it was also reflected in gaze patterns in newborns, iirc.
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.
Of course it matters. If you never noticed any difference between players from Turkey and players from the UK, well, I'm sorry, maybe you don't have a trained eye in psychological phenomena. I surely notice lots of differences in communication styles, in attitude to hardship, etc. So yeah, this will be reflected in how they do the same job too. There's a reason why British farmers hired Romanians until now and will have to switch to Ukrainians or Russians after Brexit. It's not just because it's a low-paid job, because there surely are lots of low-income people in the UK too. It's also because that spirit of putting up with physical labour and hardship is kinda missing in Britain and still found in Eastern Europe. It's not by accident that most plumber jobs are also taken by Polish people. It's not like Poland had some kind of special connection with plumbing, it's because it's a hard physical job that requires physical and mental resilience to hardship and young people in Western Europe have grown up with a much different mentality, they see such jobs are unworthy and demeaning, they'd rather work in the services sector, earn a lot more and focus on saving the planet from the menace of climate change.