Course Materials – The Oz Moment Abroad

Reading one – Key Questions

- What is an Oz Moment?
- What is an intercultural mind?

The Oz Moment Abroad:

Culture, Cognition and the Intercultural Mind

I was lost among the back roads of Banjuwedang in northwest Bali.

Fortunately, the narrow dirt track I was following led me to a modest house where I
could ask for directions. Cobs of corn were drying on a blue plastic tarp in the yard and
several people were lounging on a covered platform. Children, seemingly immune from
the burning sun, were chasing each other around in flip-flops. A young man stepped
forward to greet me. With soft-spoken Balinese courtesy he explained which path I
should take. Striking up a conversation, I learned that his name was Di Dayan, that this
was his father’s house, and that the cooing newborn was his daughter. He invited me to
share a spot in the shade.
I sipped coffee, played with the baby and chatted within the narrow limits of
our foreign language ability—his English and my Indonesian. Time slowed down as I
slipped into the rhythm of Balinese life. I live and work in Tokyo, a frenetic megalopolis
of glass and concrete, scramble crossings and bullet trains that depart at precise
20-minute intervals. Life in and around Banjuwedang, on the other hand, is still suffused
with local tradition. “Going to work” often involves fishing, farming terraced rice fields or

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hiking into the hills with a long knife to cut fodder for cows. Temples and mosques are
central to community life and flower or rice offerings are placed daily on home altars.
Tokyo skyscrapers and samurai salary men seemed as distant as another planet.
Finally, however, it was time to leave. I thanked Di Dayan, expressed pleasure at our
encounter and said I hoped that I would return.
That’s when he asked, “Are you on Facebook?”

Exploring the global village

It has become a cliché to say that we live in a global village. But in terms of
cross-cultural understanding these are confusing times. On the one hand, cultural
diversity is more accessible than ever. Communication technology and global
commerce are penetrating previously isolated places and bringing people together. I
had a wealth of information about Bali at my fingertips and residents there are more
connected than ever. People from different cultures are no longer isolated from each
other and ignorant of the broader world. In many ways, I have globalization to thank for
introducing me to Di Dayan and the world he lives in. It’s never been easier to travel,
experience life in other countries and get to know new customs, beliefs and ways of life.
On the other hand, with interconnection comes standardization, global
branding and creeping commercialism. While it’s easier to see the world it has become
less clear what it means to “experience another culture”. At the airport in Denpasar, I
walked past a Starbucks and a McDonalds on my way to a gift shop—where I bought a
box a requisite box of chocolate-covered nuts for my Japanese colleagues. Culture
itself is being turned into a commodity—a tourist draw and a product for sale. I struck up
a conversation with Claire, a French traveler who talked about Bali having been spoiled
by tourism. She had flown to the opposite side of the earth only to find a shopping mall
and gift shops. Her view was that it’s harder and harder to have an authentic experience
abroad and that culture was being washed away by a rising tide of conformity and
commercialization.
I sympathized with her about hyper-touristed areas. But my experience sitting
with Di Dayan told me a more nuanced story—one of globalization as a double-edged
sword. These days, where we have intercultural experience is becoming less important
than how we have intercultural experiences. It’s becoming—if such a thing is
possible—too easy to see the world. We can jet to distant locations yet stay insulated

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from local culture by resort hotel staff and tour guides. On the other hand, due to
increased diversity we can have powerful cross-cultural experiences right in our
hometown. It’s not the distance traveled that matters, it’s the depth of our experiences
that count. Claire and I visited the same region of Bali and came away with vastly
different impressions. Apparently we were looking for different things. For her, culture
was found in ceremonies, traditional practices and artistic expression—a quantifiable
commodity to be preserved and appreciated. I wasn’t looking for culture per se. I
wanted to step into the daily lives of the people I met. I enjoyed exploring with my
scooter, buying gasoline from the stalls along the road, using my limited Indonesian to
exchange greetings with the people I met. I wasn’t looking for culture, I was seeking an
intercultural experience. Globalization, Di Dayan reminded me, is what we make of it.

Culture and the mind

This book is about how to be more effective living and working internationally,
and how to have more meaningful intercultural experiences. Its basic message is that
while globalization brings us into contact with diversity, understanding cultural
difference and developing a global mindset is harder than we might expect. It will argue
that in spite of changing traditions, shared technology, and worldwide branding, cultural
difference is alive and well. It will explore the connection between culture and cognition
and argue that an intellectual commitment to diversity isn’t always enough to ensure
cross-cultural understanding. Despite globalization, we aren’t going “beyond” culture
any time soon.
The reason that globalization can’t take us into a post-cultural world is that
humans are cultural animals. I am using the word “culture” in a relatively narrow sense. I
am not referring to explicit products of culture, like ethnic foods, ceremonies, folk music,
crafts and so on. I am referring to deep culture, the implicit knowledge that we rely on to
interact with others in cultural communities. As we live our daily lives—go shopping,
make friends, collaborate at work, gather resources—we are constantly interacting with
others. We are highly sensitive to what others think of us, how they expect us to act,
what they consider rude, and so on. We are experts at what the Japanese call “reading
the air”. These remarkable social intuitions are so natural to us that we forget that we
have them. This ability to socialize and collaborate as part of a “world of meaningful
action” (ref) is a large part of what makes us human.

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Human social intuitions may come naturally to us but that doesn’t mean they
are simple. Our mind requires a tremendous store of implicit cultural knowledge to
perform these complex social calculations. We don’t normally think of it this way, of
course. We simply have an intuitive sense for “what’s normal” in a given situation and
“what things mean”. In familiar communities, we are good at reading the intentions and
thoughts of others. It’s true that we may be able to read basic emotions or facial
expression when abroad, but understanding what people are thinking, or what things
mean to them, is much more difficult. In the 20th century, culture was often thought of as
something layered over a deeper, more universal human nature. Now we are seeing
that cultural patterns are a foundational element of our cognition. This, in turn, helps
explain why intercultural experiences can be so powerful.
This book will look at the cognitive impact of intercultural living—the idea that
intercultural experiences have powerful yet often hidden effects on our mind. This is
partly common sense. Everyone knows that foreign travel, experiencing new cultures,
learning a new language, and so on can be exciting and informative. We all feel an itch
to explore and to transform ourselves us in some way through new experiences. It’s no
accident that people talk of being “hooked” on travel. A desire for meaningful foreign
experiences helps explain why books like Eat, Pray, Love, or Video Night in Kathmandu
reach the bestseller lists and why tourism is the world’s largest industry. It’s why we
identify with Dorothy in the movie The Wizard of Oz as she discovers and explores a
magical kingdom over the rainbow. Since Odysseus, leaving home and witnessing the
marvels of the world has always signified the power of foreign experiences to transform
us. To more fully understand the power of intercultural experiences, however, requires
more than common sense intuitions. We must examine the cognitive structures that
underlie our reactions to these experiences as well.

The Oz Moment
This is a book of stories. I have gathered many accounts of cross-cultural
experiences through my work as an intercultural educator. I help people cope with
cultural diversity and life abroad, work with executives doing business internationally or
managing multicultural teams. I conduct trainings for those setting off on a foreign work
assignment and I also work with young people studying in foreign countries. Through
courses I teach in cross-cultural comparison and intercultural adaptation, I have the

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chance to meet young people interested in travel and foreign experiences. I also teach
intercultural management to students who are launching careers in international
business. The people I work with are educated and tech savvy, the cream of the crop of
21st century internationalists. All of this gives me a privileged front-row seat to
cross-cultural contact in an age of globalization.
I’ll recount intercultural stories to illustrate the relationship between cognition
and culture. We’ll hear about a Peace Corps volunteer whose culture shock was so bad
that he ended up screaming profanity in a jungle. We’ll hear about a young woman from
Japan who, upon arriving at the Los Angeles airport, was embarrassed by the short
doors on public restroom stalls. An American who had studied international relations
found that it’s the niggling little differences that got under her skin in Tokyo, and a
student in Canada was struck with wonder because his homestay family actually owned
cows—something he had only seen on TV. These stories provide an inside-the-skin
account of what international living feels like and provide a window into cultural learning.
And of course I include stories of my own, accumulated over 25 years of international
living.
Many stories we will hear revolve around “Oz Moment” experiences. The term
has its origins in a scene from the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz". As you may recall, we
meet Dorothy, a sweet, plucky girl from Kansas who finds herself in the magical
Kingdom of Oz and must find her way home. At the beginning of the movie, a tornado
lifts her house into the sky and whirls it through the storm until it crashes down in the
magical world of Oz. With trepidation, she opens her door and steps out into a magical
realm. She looks around at a fantastic landscape of strange plants, a tiny village square
and mushroom-shaped houses. The scenes of Dorothy on her farm in Kansas are
filmed in sepia, dreary and everyday, but Oz is saturated with the vivid color of a dream
world. Clutching her dog she looks around wide-eyed and declares "Toto, I've the
feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
That’s the Oz moment. It’s a pause in our normal perceptual processes—a
feeling of disorientation or surprise when encountering novel surroundings or
hard-to-interpret phenomena. We experience this kind of mental glitch any time
something unexpected happens, as when our keys are not where we think we left them,
but Oz moments can be particularly powerful when they are a response to novelty in a
new environment. We are reminded that we aren’t at home any more, that things work

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differently here, and that we’ll have to make sense of what we see. Oz moments seem
to be a nearly universal element of cross-cultural contact and nearly all the
interculturalists I talk to remark on and try to make sense of them. Noticing my
surroundings and feeling as though I had entered another world with Di Dayan was an
example of one of my Oz moments. Oz moments occur frequently when we arrive in a
new place because so much is new to us, but they may sometimes continue to crop up
even after years of living abroad—every time we bump into things that remind us that
we’re “not in Kansas” anymore.

Culture and cognition

I will argue that we need to pay attention to Oz moments. They can help us
learn to operate more effectively when we work abroad, provide insights about cultural
difference and allow us to reflect more deeply on the meaning of our experiences. Oz
moments are a learning tool for interculturalists. To fully understand them, however, we
need to look under the hood, so to speak, at the complex machinery that makes our
mind work. Oz moments are a sign that our intuitive mind is incorporating new
information into our perceptual operating system. They are a side-effect of a deep
culture learning process.
To understand this better, we’ll take a look at some new science of the mind.
In recent years, researchers have been exploring cognitive processes that influence our
thoughts, feelings and behavior out of our conscious awareness. Books with titles such
as Blink, Thinking Twice, Subliminal, Thinking Fast and Slow, Redirect, The Art of
Deciding, Strangers to Ourselves, and How the Mind Works are helping us see that
when we shop, fall in love, make investment decisions, and judge people we are largely
affected by processes we ourselves don’t notice. We are learning that our mind is home
to hidden biases, a tendency to jump to conclusions, motivations we are unaware of,
and the deep culture algorithms that I referred to earlier.
We are often blind to the culture-cognition connection within our own minds. A
common example is the tendency to jump to ethnocentric conclusions. American
students studying in Japan, for example, often describe Japanese students as “shy”
because they speak up in class less than in the United States. When describing
Japanese behavior this way, American students feel they are simply “reporting the facts”
about “how things are” in Japan. Yet they are actually projecting their own cultural

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interpretations onto behavior that is not an indication of shyness at all. They don’t see,
for example, that Japanese students regularly find Americans to be “pushy”, hogging
valuable class time with unprompted questions or comments. Yet “shyness” and
“pushiness” are personality traits rather than cultural descriptors. Yet these words are
relative terms—someone is “shy” relative to people who are “normal”. Japanese aren’t
expressing shyness when they are listening without raising their hands and Americans
aren’t expressing pushiness when they are questioning the teacher. Often, however,
these distinctions largely escape notice by the students themselves.
Typically, we remain unaware of the role that our cultural configuration plays
in our thinking because so many cognitive processes are inaccessible to conscious
reflection. Conscious thought—the active paying of attention, the stream of thoughts in
our head, the mental images we manipulate in our minds, imagined hypothetical
outcomes—represent only one part of human thinking. There is another set of mental
processes that are equally important but more hidden, indeed often noticed hardly at all.
This hidden cognition is referred to by a range of different terms, including: the cognitive
unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, the new unconscious, fast thinking, or simply
system 1. I will use the terminology of the cognitive scientist Jonathan Evans and refer
to these processes as the intuitive mind, while referring to more conscious cognition as
the reflective mind.
The reflective mind involves focused attention. It allows us calculate our
monthly budget or talk to ourselves in our own head. The intuitive mind, on the other
hand, runs in the background like a cognitive autopilot, helping us manage the routines
of everyday living. It operates largely outside of our conscious awareness and allows us
to accomplish highly complex tasks—everything from brushing our teeth and driving our
car to work, to using socially appropriate forms of address—with almost no conscious
awareness. It is instrumental in motivating us, making judgments, filtering information,
and reading the emotions and mental states of others. The miracle of the intuitive mind
is that it operates so naturally and easily. But there’s a catch. The intuitive mind
operates smoothly as long as our environment is predictable but doesn’t do so well
when confronted with new patterns or exceptions to previously learned rules. It has a
tendency to jump to conclusions, to make assumptions and to avoid conflicting signals
or mixed messages. It seeks cognitive coherence, something that can be hard to come
by when we are bumbling along in a foreign environment.

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Is it really necessary to learn about cognition to have meaningful intercultural

experiences? Of course not. But learning about our intuitive mind is like looking through
a users manual for a camera with highly advanced features. We typically snap pictures
on auto mode, paying little attention to how the camera works. But when shooting
conditions differ from our cameras pre-programmed parameters, this can trip us up. If
there is lots of snow in the frame, or the subject is backlit, or there’s less light than usual,
we need to make adjustments. To do this, we need to dig out the manual and learn
more about the settings, figure out how to make adjustments and take advantage of the
full potential of the technology at our disposal. In the same way, learning about our
cognitive processes can expand our intercultural repertoire.

The intercultural mind

Where does all this lead? Although biases and ethnocentrism are a natural
part of our cognitive architecture we are not slaves to cultural programming. Our brain
has enormous plasticity. We can learn to decipher behavior that was previously unclear,
integrate new patterns of thinking, expand perceptual frameworks, increase our
cognitive flexibility, and even learn to inhabit multiple cultural worlds. Doing these things
is something like learning a foreign language, not easy or effortless but possible through
concerted effort and practice.
I call these higher-order cognitive abilities the intercultural mind. A person with
an intercultural mind has succeeded in reconfiguring mental processes that have a
tendency to lead us astray. She has learned to be aware of cultural judgments and
gained the ability to switch cultural frames of reference. He understands intuitively that
different cultural communities around the world operate under differing sets of beliefs
and assumptions. This doesn’t guarantee cross-cultural understanding or effectiveness,
but it’s an excellent first step. Unfortunately, not everyone who has intercultural
experiences progresses evenly towards this greater cognitive flexibility. We can get
stuck along the way, defending our existing frameworks, oblivious to the patterns in
front of us, comfortable with our biases, and never escaping the cognitive trap of
ethnocentricity.
This book presents ideas about culture and cognition that have seemed
useful to the interculturalists that I work with. Some examples:

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- Our intuitive mind does not work “out of the box” when we are born. It
must go through a linguistic and cultural configuration process. The
acquisition of these patterns can be seen as a programming of your
mental operating system.

- Deep cultural knowledge is encoded into our minds as neural networks of

associate memory. Americans know, for example, that “mother” is
associated with “apple pie”. To understand a cultural worldview from the
inside, we must learn new networks of meaning, which we often do
through the use of a foreign language.

- Certain biases are built into our cognitive architecture. Ethnocentrism

involves a mono-cultural framing of our experiences. This and other
biases are natural products of the structure of our minds. We’ll also talk
about the coherence bias, the fundamental attribution error, and the mere
exposure effect. All of these affect how we respond to intercultural
experiences.

- Our perceptions of the world are affected by cultural conditioning. Deep

culture doesn’t dictate our thoughts and perception but it does effect how
we process information, what we pay attention to, and how we make
sense of situations.

- Cultural conditioning equips us with systematic intuitions that help us

interpret the world around us. It’s easy to misjudge behavior in other
cultural communities because we “read” people’s intentions intuitively
through a filter of cultural interpretation.

- Intercultural experiences can lead to new cultural frames. People with

extensive intercultural experience learn to “see the world with new eyes”,
and may switch back and forth between different cultural views. These
mental frames exist as neural networks whose workings can be
measured.

- We can get better at interpreting and deciphering the hidden patterns of

cultural difference we’re likely to find abroad. We can do this by learning a
kind of deep culture grammar—a systematic understanding of cultural
difference around the world. Deep culture patterns are not infinitely
variable. When we understand these underlying structures, we discover
our shared humanity hand-in-hand with tremendous diversity.

Some people will dislike some words that I use here, such as cultural conditioning. It
may sound, ironically, dehumanizing—as though I think that people are robots
programmed to respond blindly to cultural input. That’s obviously too reductionist to be
accurate. On the contrary, learning about culture and cognition empowers us and helps

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us take responsibility for our own intercultural outcomes.

Throughout this book, I will connect the stories of interculturalists to findings
from cultural neuroscience. Because many readers approach these subjects intuitively,
I will tell stories to illustrate my points, such as my experience with Di Dayan that
opened this chapter. This form of learning appeals to the intuitive mind. But I also want
to harness the analytic power of the reflective mind and will introduce key concepts,
research results, and provide descriptions of cognitive processes. I will attempt to avoid
jargon, but cognition is a complex phenomena—how could it be otherwise—and
requires a certain level of abstraction to talk about. My goal is that these two
approaches reinforce each other and lead to understanding that is both intuitively
convincing and rationally coherent.
This brings us back to my experience with Di Dayan. Since meeting him, I
have returned a number of times to Bali, gotten to know his family, attended local
festivals together, eaten in his home and seen him at work. I am currently studying
Indonesian on-line with a school in Yogyakarta and have made other friends in the
Banjuwedang area. This sort of deep culture learning, of course, takes time and
involves many Oz moments. I’ve found, for example, that the Hindu and Muslim
communities in the Banjuwedang area live close together but culturally apart—like two
hands that are separate but which function together. As I explore, I find myself feeling
different from Claire, who stated that there was no place left in the world to explore. I
find that, on the contrary, it’s impossible to fit the world’s diversity into a single human
mind. In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at just how destabilizing it can be when our
mental systems are overloaded by this learning process, and how transformational it
can be when we reconfigure the cultural settings of our mind.

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