Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization

Introduction

We live in a world that is becoming flatter and flatter. Global business and trade, the ease of air travel, and the unending flow of information and communication are all combining to create a kind of homogenized, cultural soup into which we are all being inexorably pulled. Whether you are in Beijing, Dubai, or Reykjavík, the ubiquity of global brands and the extent of cultural fusion can make everything around you look and feel comfortingly familiar, if somewhat blandly uniform. Backpackers know this and go to great lengths, admittedly sometimes in a self-defeating, cattle-like manner, to discover corners of the world that our global culture has not yet infiltrated or homogenized.

However, one theme emerges with surprising regularity when you talk to people who have moved to a different culture and lived there for some time—this surface similarity is something of an illusion only held by the transient tourist or business traveler. “You don't realize just how different this place really is once you have been here some time,” people who have deeper experience will often say. While things can appear familiar on the surface, over time a gradual realization sinks in that the deep psychological and cultural instincts of different societies really are different in profound, nonsuperficial ways. You find that while it might have been easy to engage the culture initially, you eventually hit a permafrost layer through which an outsider cannot penetrate. Over time, you often ...