Cultural Values and Cultural Attitudes

Cultural values involve judgments (that is, they specify what is good or bad) and are normative (that is, they state or imply what should be). Most people in the United States feel that bullfighting is disgusting and cruel. But to many Mexicans and Spaniards, bullfighting is an important and exciting sport. Similarly, most people in the United States place a negative value on nepotism (hiring or favoring a relative) and on bribery. In other nations, these activities are valued positively and are widely practiced. In some cultures, the chief financial officer of a company is often the brother or at least a close relative of the company president, who thinks that this relative can be trusted with the company's money.

Many attitudes are based on cultural values. In the United States, freedom is a dominant value. In others, it is just one value among others. The meaning of any value, including freedom, differs across cultures. An old woman in Saigon told one of the authors that she felt that she could not tolerate the lack of freedom in the United States. In Vietnam she was free to sell her vegetables on the sidewalk without being hassled by police or city authorities. She did not have to get a permit to fix the roof on her house. She had the freedom to vote for a communist candidate if she wanted to. She believed that in the United States, where her children lived, people were expected to tell others what they thought. In Vietnam she had the freedom to remain silent. Her perceptions determined her behavior; she refused to immigrate to the United States to join her children.

When one of the authors was teaching at Stanford University, a professor friend told him about selling his daughter's horse. She loved this horse very much, rode it often, and regarded it as her special pet. When she left for college, her father decided that the horse should be sold. He placed an ad in a local newspaper and promptly received a telephone call from an interested party. They agreed on a price, and the buyers arrived shortly in a pick-up truck. They paid the $200 and then shot the horse with a rifle at pointblank range, threw the carcass in the back of their vehicle, and drove off. The professor was horrified and worried about telling his daughter about her pet's death. The buyers were Tongans (a community of people from Tonga), who relish barbecued horse meat. The values attached to a horse are obviously quite different if it is regarded as a pet versus food.

Norms

Norms are the established behavior patterns for members of a social system. If a cultural norm is violated, the individual is socially punished for not fulfilling the expectations of his/her system. An example of violating a cultural norm occurred when a French woman visiting Saudi Arabia used her left hand to eat out of a communal bowl of rice and lamb. Her Saudi friends suddenly lost their appetites. The left hand is considered unclean in the Middle East and Asia, and cultural norms prohibit handing an object to someone with the left hand. There is a historical reason for the left-handed taboo in these cultures, related to cleaning the body with the left hand after defecation.

Thai people revere their king, so much so that they seldom talk about him and are culturally forbidden to touch him. A U.S. professor, during the first months that he taught at Bangkok University, accidentally dropped a Thai coin on the floor. In order to keep the coin from rolling under a door, he quickly stepped on it. His Thai students were shocked. Why? The king's profile is on every coin.

A recent university graduate from the United States was interning in a Japanese company in Nagoya. He related his experiences in violating a Japanese cultural norm about proper office behavior: " During the first week in the company, I asked a fellow employee, a young woman, for a date. She became very embarrassed and told me that she could not go out with me because we worked in the same unit. By that evening, everyone in my office knew what had happened. Several of my colleagues made jokes of rather poor taste about my mistake. For the next several months, references were made about my asking Yuki for a date, especially after my colleagues had had too much to drink. Eventually, a year later, I learned that I was referred to, behind my back, with a nickname in Japanese that connoted something like 'skirt-chaser'.

This example shows the various ways in which an individual violating a cultural norm was punished: through gossip, joking, and by use of a humorous nickname.