Cultural DNAs
The lynchpin of discourse
I was once asked by a friend, who was struggling to learn English, how English articles worked. Why does “I want to play the basketball” sound odd, but “I want to play basketball” sound correct? I could not come up with an answer on the spot, so I had to look it up later. Even though I spent a considerable part of my life studying English and linguistics, the rules for articles managed to slip past me. Even though, as a native English speaker, I follow the grammatical rules every day, I cannot immediately point them all out.
Language is not the only time our brain uses the subconscious. When we drive, we do not need to explicitly recall everything we learn from the beginner lessons. When we socialize, we do not need to constantly refer to a large bank of psychology notes. For the most part, our subconscious activity is convenient and energy-efficient. However, our subconscious can become an obstacle when we try to learn about perspectives from people around the world. Similar to the scenario where I failed to explain how English works to a non-native speaker, a person could fail to explain their perspective, experience, or culture to an outsider because they cannot share their subconscious assumptions without preparation.
There are many ways a person’s subconscious assumptions can be formed and influenced: socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, geographic location, occupation, religion, family, media, education, the list goes on. Each of these elements has a set of subconscious assumptions associated with them, which we can call a “culture”. Every person possesses a combination of cultures, which we can refer to as a “cultural DNA”. This cultural DNA is most susceptible to change during childhood and adolescence.
When we draw this link between neuroscience and culture, many situations become easier to understand. If a person enters a group where they feel like an outsider, it is because their cultural DNA is different from the rest of the members. Since subconscious assumptions help the brain with energy-efficiency, a brain that needs to operate outside of its subconscious assumptions will expend more energy than usual. This increase in energy consumption can cause discomfort.
Socioeconomic class is probably the culture that has the most significant impact on cultural DNA, because the living conditions have a direct affect on the brain. Children who grow up malnourished will inevitably fall behind in brain development. Poverty robs people of the ability to think long-term, because scarcity rewires the brain to allocate energy for short-term objectives.
One very practical use of this cultural DNA model is understanding the difference between tokenizing and insensitivity. Let’s say that around 20% of my cultural DNA is made up of my background as an Asian-American. There have been situations in my life where, as a lone Asian, people would tokenize me. Tokenization is unacceptable because it assumes that 100% of my cultural DNA is taken from my Asian background, which undermines the other 80%. In other scenarios, people have said some pretty insensitive remarks because they did not consider what I had gone through as an Asian living in America, which undermines that 20% Asian-American part of my cultural DNA. In both cases, some percentage of my identity was being undermined. A genuine interaction between people would recognize that cultural DNAs have many components without undermining any of them.
The idea that so many combinations of cultures can make up a cultural DNA should transform the way we approach our most urgent conversations. Rather than labelling someone’s background in terms of what country they grew up in, or what their religious background is, we must work to identify what the subconscious assumptions are, explore what experiences can generate those assumptions, and understand how larger perspectives are built off of those assumptions.
Acknowledgements: A lot of ideas here are loosely inspired by Lisa Feldman Barrett’s and Eldar Shafir’s work.
