Human problems are rooted in culture. That is, they are problems about values, community, and human factors like age, class, and gender—which are dimensions of culture. Over the past two decades, I have developed several models and definitions that frame culture as the shared mind of human societies. This is reality we create by common consent. It is the set of clues that defines the largest system of meaning possible, one invented and growing along with our evolution as a species. It is still in development. And the mega-system all other human systems fit into.
Here are a few examples of how culture shapes decisions
below our conscious threshold.
Medical compliance:
A pharmaceutical company may develop an excellent medication that will
save lives, but the way patients actually use it will determine how wide its acceptance
and effectiveness will be. If a medication requires you to take a tablet every
six hours, are you going to set your alarm clock to wake at 4:00 a.m. so you
can take a pill? Anyone who has spent time in a hospital bed knows how annoying
to is to be awakened by a nurse in the middle of the night because it is time
to take your medications. Similarly, the long sticky Q-tip used to detect
Covid-19 (nasopharyngeal or NP test) is the testing device that swabs inside the
upper nose to detect the virus. It is
universally detested. Even health-care
workers, who must be tested weekly, dread this procedure. It is invasive and psychologically difficult.
Why? Because it goes
very far up your nose, which is one of the body’s hot spots – along with the eyes,
ears, mouth, breasts, and lower down, the buttocks and genitals. This test invades a sacred body space: we
just know intuitively that it feels wrong (OBGYN exams feel weird, too). How many are not getting screened at all, for
this reason alone? Yale developed a saliva-only
version that works as well while safer and noninvasive (August 2020). It’s not yet available. Next time, a study of how humans relate to
their own bodies—the biology basis of culture—would reveal this problem to promote
a far better solution.
The work of cultural analysis is to crack complex issues and
artifacts by getting at the (often invisible) human factors involved. These tools often have to work around hidden cultural
assumptions that prevent a thorough appreciation of social bonds such as
gender, age-based change, and context.
They can reveal how these dimensions all work to drive thinking,
behavior, and decision making.
One example is race. The single Race category in current
sciences is “Human.” Not a political statement, but a scientific one. Race is a cultural construction, not one
grounded in science.
Race versus Class:
When people talk about race, they are almost always talking about class.
Race has often been used as a marker for class, but they are in no way
comparable. Labeling comes with a set of
assumptions. If race is a negative label, that label can signal class-based assumptions
like poverty, crime, failure, diminished status, or disruption of other
classes’ agendas. But Americans don’t
really talk about class. Class is harder to define or measure than race, and in
the US, we assume that no one is destined to be confined by the class they were
born into. It is heavily mixed with ideas about achievement, social mobility,
aspiration—as well as blame, when the first three aren’t attained. Middle-class is the preferred state (even
over upper class, at least when it comes to self-identification) and failure to
arrive in the middle is often seen as the fault of the individual. Which is why falling short is frequently
assigned to lack of motivation, social ties, self-esteem, or social
justice.
The aim of cultural analysis is to make the invisible
visible, to derive the core cultural values - the preferred states - that drive
any culture as its engine of meaning. What are people driving at – what are
they trying to achieve with their money, time, energy, and social connections? The simplest and most accurate method is by studying
group behavior. If what people say doesn’t match what they do, follow the behavior.
Behavior is how we truly express belief.
Cultural analysis can identify and frame the cultural values
equation active in any number of domains, from gender agendas and mall design
to the high-stakes decisions of the middle class: college, career, car, house, and spouse. How does the short list of cultural values
serve as the default to making these decisions?
Inherent in much of American decision-making are issues of class that
even ad agencies refuse to address directly – especially as applied to higher
education, the wellspring of class identity.
Higher Education:
As one case example, the college experience isn’t about libraries
bursting with information, or even degreed professors (two ways college is
sold). College life is socialization--learning
lifestyles and mentalities that allow following a sophisticated path forward
into work and social channels that mark high-value futures. These futures rely on relating to other
college-educated people (world-wide) across professions and national borders. This could be called global style.
Global style:
Higher education underpins a world-class style loosely fashioned on
British and American models, with English as the lingua franca, enabled by
digital technology (computers, science, media), an enlightened secular outlook,
and the primacy of the individual over the group (America’s prime
directive). Otherwise, this
international style is diverse, gender-equal, and based on middle-class,
pan-ethnic, and unapologetically future-oriented vistas.
The cultural analysis approach interprets culture as the
common language of social influence and aspiration. Like the language component
of culture, it is shared code for understanding reality distinct from other
codes, with its own structure and expression.
Four Dimensions
Our model takes four major dimensions to be key study areas
–gender, age, context, and community.
This approach considers gender as the only biological difference between
people. What is the first thing we
notice about someone we’ve never met in person before? The answer is gender. Yet as many times as I’ve posed this simple question
to people, they never think of male or female because this difference is just
simply noted subconsciously.
Age stages from infancy through old age are not just
biological; they determine decade by decade our priorities in making
decisions. Context—our social and
physical environment—sets our mental agenda: what is this place, and what am I
supposed to do, and who should I be, while I’m here? Place is a total mental as well as
psychological container. Community is
our social sphere of influence, including, working out of the life circle from
the center, self, mother, father, siblings, relations, neighbors, associates
(including religion), colleagues, familiars (your local supermarket checkout or
postal worker) and finally, strangers (who we look at for signs of danger, and
if we don’t see any, we ignore).
The current clashes on culture, cancel culture, and
political correctness are matters of class, not race. Looked at in this way as cultural issues
rather than political ones, they can be redefined, re-cast, and re-considered
in terms that people can relate to. It
can be incredibly difficult to change people’s minds about race, and you can’t
change someone’s race, either. But class
is fluid, changeable, and something people can do something about.
We explore the research bases of Popular Culture, American
Studies, cross-cultural studies, decision theory, evolutionary psychology, and
social science to show how cultural studies (taken without political bias) can
be aimed to understand how people—as customers and clients – are influenced to
think and act.
