Cultures: Norms & Values

Cultures are the networks of ideas that we share with groups of people, that help us understand the world, and behave within it.

Cultures are:

• difficult to see from the inside. They shape how we think, but this becomes just “the way the world is” to us. It is hard for us to imagine how other people could see it differently
• Learned. We aren’t born with it, but we absorb it from parents, schools, and peers over the years.
• Functional and adaptive. It doesn’t always succeed at these goals, but these rules are usually developed to try to achieve something – be that coordinating how we all get food to eat, or how we learn calculus.

How does culture work?

• Coding: it helps decide what things mean. From simple symbols (words, colours, gestures) to subtle connotations that shade the meaning of things, to narratives that encode where things are from and how they are used. Sometimes brand names become their own codes
• Norms: The rules for what we are (and aren’t) supposed to do. These can be obvious and explicit (“the law says no stealing”), and they can be implicit and subtle (“be seen to take notes in your work meeting to look more professional”)
• Values: the things people (and brands) should be like in order to be desiriable (or avoid being undesirable). We cover Hofstede’s 6 categories for how values seem to vary across cultures, ways that values are sometimes used for segmentation, and then at whether values shape consumer preferences (they do, but usually weakly if at all), and Aaker’s model of how products are seen as having different values in different countries. When things (or places or people or events) are valued as special anthropologists call this ‘sacred’, and when they are special in a bad way, this is ‘taboo’ (‘profane’ being simply ordinary)
• Norms and values only affect us when we bring them into our working memory. Sometimes our minds find them automatically for us, other times we have to think for a moment about how we are supposed to behave, and other times we can be genuinely uncertain about what the appropriate local norms are – this can be stressful if we realize that we might be judged, but aren’t sure what to do.