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What Is Different Is Dangerous 191

At first the combination of these three questions did not make sense. Why
should someone who feels under stress also want rules to be respected and
want his or her career to be long-term? But this is a false interpretation.
The data do not suggest that “someone” shares these three attitudes. When
we looked at the answers of individual “someones,” the answers to the three
questions were not correlated. It was the differences in mean answers by
country for the three questions that were correlated. So, if in a country more
people felt under stress at work, in the same country more people wanted
rules to be respected, and more people wanted to have a long-term career.
The distinction is that the individuals who held each of these feelings did
not need to be the same persons.
As we argued in Chapter 2, the culture of a country—or of another cat-
egory of people—is not a combination of properties of the “average citizen,”
nor a “modal personality.” It is, among other things, a set of likely reactions
of citizens with a common mental programming. One person may react in
one way (such as feeling more nervous), and another in another way (such
as wanting rules to be respected). Such reactions need not be found within
the same individuals, but only statistically more often in the same society.
The interpretation of the association among questions 1 through 3 at
the society level does make sense. We assume that all three are expressions
of the level of anxiety that exists in a particular society in the face of an
uncertain future. This level of anxiety forms part of the shared mental pro-
gramming of people in that society—in the family, at school, and in adult
life. Because of this anxiety level, a relatively larger share of individuals
will feel nervous or tense at work (question 1). The idea of breaking a com-
pany rule—for whatever good reason—is rejected by more people (ques-
tion 2), because it introduces ambiguity: what if all employees would just
start doing as they pleased? Finally, changing employers is less popular in

such a country (question 3), for it means venturing into the unknown.
Uncertainty avoidance can therefore be defi ned as the extent to which the
members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations. This
feeling is, among other manifestations, expressed through nervous stress
and in a need for predictability: a need for written and unwritten rules.
The UAI values for seventy-six countries and regions are listed in
Table 6.1. In a way similar to the computation of the power distance index
(Chapter 3), the index value for each country was computed from the mean
scores of questions 1 and 2 and the percentage score for question 3. The
formula used is based on simple mathematics: adding or subtracting the

three scores after multiplying each by a fixed number, and fi nally adding