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206 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES
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a page long. Students in these countries will not, as a rule, confess to
intellectual disagreement with their teachers. A Ph.D. candidate who fi nds
him- or herself in conflict with a thesis adviser on an important issue has
the choice of changing his or her mind or finding another adviser. Intel-
lectual disagreement in academic matters is felt as personal disloyalty.
Students from weak uncertainty- avoidance countries accept a teacher
who says, “I don’t know.” Their respect goes to teachers who use plain
language and to books explaining difficult issues in ordinary terms. Intel-
lectual disagreement in academic matters in these cultures can be seen as
a stimulating exercise, and we know of thesis advisers whose evaluation of
a Ph.D. candidate is positively related to the candidate’s amount of well-
argued disagreement with the professor’s position.
In similar situations students in low-UAI countries were more likely to
attribute their achievements to their own ability, and students in high-UAI
countries to circumstances or luck. In two different studies, each covering
students from five countries, the relative tendency to attribute achievement
to ability was significantly negatively correlated with UAI. 30
The examples used so far stem from university and postgraduate teach-
ing and learning situations, but the behavior and expectations of both stu-
dents and teachers in these examples were clearly developed during earlier
school experiences. One more difference related to uncertainty avoidance,
which operates specifically at the elementary- and secondary-school level,
is the expected role of parents versus teachers. In cultures with strong
uncertainty avoidance, parents are sometimes brought in by teachers as
an audience, but they are rarely consulted. Parents are lay persons, and
teachers are experts who know. In countries with weak uncertainty avoid-
ance, teachers often try to get parents involved in their children’s learning
process: they actively seek parents’ ideas.
Uncertainty Avoidance in Shopping
The previous chapter referred to the studies of Dutch marketing expert
Marieke de Mooij. She found many significant links between the IBM
indexes and consumer behavior differences among sixteen affl uent Euro-
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pean countries. Next to masculinity-femininity, uncertainty avoidance
played the most important role.