Why learning about culture and personality should go hand in hand

The tagline of this website is ‘a website about culture and personality’. I believe that learning about culture and personality should go together. Here are three reasons why I think they are inseparable.

1. Separately they paint an incomplete picture

Intercultural communication trainings can sometimes appear deterministic: if you know a person’s culture, you know how to negotiate a business deal with them. But of course, any group or culture is made up of a multitude of different people with different personalities.

And at the same time, one personality type can be expressed very differently depending on the environment – be it national culture, family culture, or company culture. American extraversion is different from Chinese extraversion, to name just an example.

Maybe you once found yourself puzzled by the behavior or beliefs of a new person you met. We often unconsciously assume the reason to be either their personality or their culture. But they are both factors that build identity, in addition to individual life experiences. To understand ourselves and others, we must acknowledge these different dimensions.

2. Learning about one accelerates learning about the other

“What do they of England know, who only England know?” asked Rudyard Kipling. You can’t understand light if you don’t know dark. Contrasts define. Truly knowing yourself – your personality or your culture – demands knowing others. And knowing others demands knowing yourself.

We are often not aware of how profoundly an impact the culture we are surrounded with has on our identity, our values, and what we find important. We explain and understand these things as if they were decisions we made or because they are ‘normal’.

It is when we meet others or other places where other things are ‘normal’ that we can get an idea of just how much of who we are is determined by external factors. When we go to a different place and learn about a new culture, we will inevitably learn about our own culture and realize the impact it has on our identity and personality.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall wrote it best: “Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”

And lastly, contrasts can explain but they can also construct: which part of your identity is emphasized depends on what it is contrasted to. In a group of foreigners, we feel our national culture very strongly. In a group of older people, you feel young. (This is why I have called multicultural Dubai world’s least cosmopolitan city: in contrast to so many other nationalities, it is our nationality that gets emphasized.)

3. Growth and change happens in new environments

Understanding of self and others is just a beginning. The more important steps are, respectively, personal development and creating connections.

We are invested in being a certain way in our own environment. Stepping out of your comfort zone into a different place, it is so much easier to discover new things and change and grow as a person.

Encountering differences are opportunities for learning. Growth is also building bridges. But connection is not giving yourself up or compromising your own values. You can’t establish a bridge without a strong foundation, without knowing where you start building from.

New places and people can help us to become our authentic self and can teach us how to remain our authentic self.