Values guide business behaviors and habits. Choosing values specific to the institution, matching these values with the values of the individual and value promotion efforts create the roadmap for human change. The positive and beneficial nature of change is an individual and social expectation. In this article, we focus on habits, which are among the factors that play a role in activating change.
In order to manage our mindset, we must first recognize our mindset. The part of our mindset that is shaped by culture is probably bigger and more important than we think. Trying to understand different cultures without judging them by getting to know them will also teach us a lot about ourselves.
One of the fundamental factors that shapes our values, perspectives and way of thinking is culture. Culture is a product of collective living. It is the totality of thoughts, meanings and values shared by individuals who form a society. Culture is to society what memory is to humans.1
We can see the hereditary and learned factors that shape our attitudes, habits and emotions, listed from general to specific in the triangle in Figure 1:
Figure 1. Factors that shape our mentality.
The first factor that makes us who we are is undoubtedly our human nature. Humans have to fill their stomachs by nature. They have the instinct to help each other. They want to be happy. We are born with many codes like these written into our minds.
The culture we have comes second. This step includes more regional and specific characteristics than the universal characteristics we share with every human being. Let’s consider the first example above, the need to fill our stomachs: What we want to fill our stomachs with is shaped by the soil and climate we live in. For example, the Japanese eat rice and seaweed, the Eskimos eat fish, we Turks eat wheat, meat and olive oil; we consume more yogurt than milk because many of us are lactose intolerant, etc. Of course, nutritional preferences vary from region to region within Turkey.
If we consider other examples of the needs of ‘mutual assistance’ and ‘being happy’, we realize that who we help and how we help varies from society to society. How we become happy and how we experience and express it also differs according to culture. For example, while we Turks seek more stable and calm emotions such as ‘peace’, Americans pursue higher energy emotions such as ‘excitement’ and ‘joy’. They have even invented roller coasters in amusement parks for this purpose.
The last factor at the top of the triangle is our personality. First universal, then regional factors, the third step is truly ‘specific to us’… In the nutritional example, my liking for leeks with olive oil, and your liking for yogurt soup… Or what I understand by ‘mutual assistance’ may be providing financial aid to those in need, while you may find a solution to your friend’s troubles and comfort those in need. While I find happiness in walking in the forest, you may find it in a nice meal with your family.
Human nature (universal), culture (social) and personality (individual); we can see these as three steps that shape our mentality – our perception, thought, attitude, behavior and feeling. Human nature is hereditary; culture and personality include both learned and hereditary characteristics. While it was thought that culture was a completely learned value system, the discovery that it also has hereditary characteristics in recent years has excited the scientific world.
How aware are we of the effects of our culture?
Another characteristic of culture is that it is implicit. Edward T. Hall, who is considered the founder of intercultural communication, expressed this implicitness as follows: “There is much more hidden than the visible part of culture; it is hidden most of all from its owners.”2 In other words, we are not very aware of how the culture we live in shapes our mentality. Everything has a way and procedure, and we do not realize that there may be ‘different ways and procedures’ until we encounter them.
Culture is, in a sense, like the air we breathe. We take in the oxygen we need to live automatically and naturally, without thinking. However, if we fall into the water, we see that there is a world of fish that manage to take in oxygen in a very different way than we do. We understand that there are also creatures that can breathe in different ways. Starting to live in a different culture is similar to trying to live underwater at first; like a ‘fish out of water’, we turn into a ‘person who has entered the water’.
During this period called ‘culture shock’, we can think about how right our own attitudes and habits are, and how wrong and absurd others are. Over time, with the adaptation period that replaces culture shock, we can come to the conclusion that different methods also have correct or useful aspects.
Conclusion
In order to change our mentality, we must first realize our mentality. The part of our mentality that is shaped by culture is probably bigger and more important than we think. Getting to know different cultures and trying to understand them without judging them will also teach us a lot about ourselves.
Ref: Cultural awarness and the process of acculturation [İnternet]. Uygun erişim: http://archive.ecml.at/mtp2/Iccinte/results/en/theoretical-background-3.htm
Kluckhohn C. Culture and behavior. In Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G Lindzey, 2:921–76. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesle ; 1954.
İdil Sevil; Baltaş Grubu, Eğitim Program Yöneticisi
https://kaynakbaltas.com/inovasyon/zihniyeti-sekillendiren-gorunmeyen-guc-kultur/
