I-House: Where UC Berkeley Meets the World

In my first post on this topic I discussed the basics of intercultural competence. Here we dig a little deeper, using something called the Intercultural Development Continuum, or IDC. Here’s what the IDC looks like:

In this post we’ll continue the theme from last week’s post, delving into the social psychology of U.S. American “peachiness” — the relative shallowness of many U.S. American social ties.

In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing Psychological Anthropology” (American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 23-44). In the essay he sketches out a model for understanding differences between the psychologies of Chinese people and Westerners.

He uses this image (p. 25) to make his point: Continue reading →

In a recent post I introduced readers to the concept of “peach” cultures and “coconut” cultures. Then yesterday a colleague sent me a link to this article from the UC Davis student newspaper, which discusses the same issue.

All this talk about U.S. Americans and our “superficial” relationships got me thinking about an article I read several years ago by a famous Chinese anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong. Fei, probably China’s best-known anthropologist, spent the 1943–44 academic year in the United States, during the closing phase of World War II. He observed that America is a “land without ghosts,” which became the title of a collection of essays by Chinese visitors to the U.S. (Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989). His own childhood, filled with “ghosts” — echoes of deep human relationships — stood in stark contrast to the “ghostless” U.S. He wrote: Continue reading →

In our CIL workshops we often begin with a short discussion of what we mean by “culture.” People are often surprised to find out how deeply culture affects our moment-to-moment existence. In fact, it turns out, culture affects even how we see the world.

A study was published in 2000 by Li-Jun Ji, Kaiping Peng (of our own UC Berkeley) and Richard E. Nisbett (Culture, Control and Perception of Relationships in the Environment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, vol. 78, No. 5, 943-955). Two groups of subjects — European Americans and Chinese (from Taiwan), all undergraduates at the University of Michigan — took the “rod and frame” test. The apparatus looks like this:

Continue reading →