Eddy Van Hemelrijck - In Stefan Klein’s book “All by chance” which I just finished reading, Stefan Klein refers to the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel price of Economics in 2002 with the imaginary Linda.

 

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more likely?

1.      Linda is a bank teller.

2.      Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

85% of those asked chose option 2. However, mathematically, the probability of two events occurring together (in "conjunction") will always be less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone.

Why does the majority of people however choose for option one? This is because our brains search for patterns. What we can imagine looks more probable to us. It is hard to believe for us that somebody as intelligent as Linda would be happy with money counting only. 

Especially when we are uncertain and under stress our brain prefers to make shortcuts and patterns to gain time. Psychologists call this tunnel vision: under pressure our range of vision narrows, we think less, but fall back on prejudices. We gain time by doing so, but quite often we draw the wrong conclusions.

When we are doing business overseas, we are not in our natural environment. This creates uncertainty and stress. Our brains look for patterns we know. We rely on prejudices to make a quick assessment of the situation. But, quite often, by doing so our assessment is wrong.

In order to avoid making wrong conclusions we must try to put our prejudices aside and break out of our normal patterns by meeting people and looking at situations with an open mind. You will be surprised how this will not only improve your rate of success when doing business overseas but enrich your life in general.

 

 

Francis Laleman - Indeed. All too often, training concepts on intercultural awareness and intercultural skills tend to narrow down questions of  identity, forcing these into the straight-jackets of straightforward "types", "stereotypes", and hence blatant prejudice.

Just like the Kahneman Linda conjecture, people tend to choose the easiest path, which, upon careful consideration, turns out to be in fact the less likely solution.

Interestingly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" (Allen Lane, 2007), has identified the exact same phenomenon, when discusssing human's near-fundamental unability to predict the outcome of a process. What is to blame here, argues Taleb, is the "narrative fallacy: which addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them".

Further down, Taleb explains how the narrative fallacy, where explanations bind facts together in order to make them more comprehensible, explainable and easy to remember, increases not our understanding, but rather our "impression of understanding" - which, ultimately, would bring us to choosing the wrong kind of action more confidently than before.

This is why training concepts in intercultural awareness, instead of categorizing cultural vectors into clearly defined cultural product sheets,  binding cultural facts into blatantly obvious and easliy explained narratives, should take care to create the exact opposite mindset: one where the attendees are invited to let go of the obvious stereotypes, and discover that human beings are, at the same time!,  the sum of vectors with regard to skills & competences, personality & behaviour, and a multiple variety of contextual parameters (such as group adherences, community identities and cultural patterns).

Weaving and unweaving this fabric of diversity, and reading this diversity product sheet as a roadbook of options, opportunities and possibilities (rather than "problems to be solved", is what diversity training is all about.