Page 22 - Cultures and Organizations

The Rules of the Social Game 7

ming. However, what one does with these feelings, how one expresses fear,

joy, observations, and so on, is modified by culture.
The personality of an individual, on the other hand, is his or her unique
personal set of mental programs that needn’t be shared with any other
human being. It is based on traits that are partly inherited within the indi-
vidual’s unique set of genes and partly learned. Learned means modifi ed
by the influence of collective programming (culture) as well as by unique

personal experiences.
Cultural traits have often been attributed to heredity, because philoso-
phers and other scholars in the past did not know how to otherwise explain
the remarkable stability of differences in culture patterns among human
groups. They underestimated the impact of learning from previous genera-
tions and of teaching to a future generation what one has learned oneself.
The role of heredity is exaggerated in pseudotheories of race, which have
been responsible, among other things, for the holocaust organized by the

Nazis during World War II. Ethnic strife is often justified by unfounded
arguments of cultural superiority and inferiority.
In the United States there have been periodic scientifi c discussions
on whether certain ethnic groups, in particular blacks, could be geneti-
5
cally less intelligent than others, in particular whites. The arguments
used for genetic differences, by the way, make Asians in the United States
on average more intelligent than whites. However, it is extremely diffi cult,
if not impossible, to find tests of intelligence that are culture free. Such

tests should reflect only innate abilities and be insensitive to differences in
the social environment. In the United States a larger share of blacks than
of whites has grown up in socially disadvantaged circumstances, which

is a cultural influence no test known to us can circumvent. The same
logic applies to differences in intelligence between ethnic groups in other

countries.

Symbols, Heroes, Rituals, and Values

Cultural differences manifest themselves in several ways. From the many
terms used to describe manifestations of culture, the following four together
cover the total concept rather neatly: symbols, heroes, rituals, and values.
In Figure 1.2 these have been pictured as the skins of an onion, indicating
that symbols represent the most superficial and values the deepest mani-

festations of culture, with heroes and rituals in between.