Hi there! I'd like to talk to you about bar graphs. Bar graphs are this beautiful way of showing very clearly and quickly differences or similarities between two groups.
For example, here are a bunch from my research on how bad it is to do different types of behaviors, and I asked this question of Canadians and Chinese people, and so here are a bunch of bar graphs showing those average differences which are really interesting, but bar graphs are a little bit tricky. They may get into your head and you may look at that and feel like, oh those people in that other culture, they're like a different type of person than I am. And that is just not the same at all.
So let me show you how we get from a bunch of different individual answers into a bar graph because we have a saying in cultural psychology which is that within culture differences are almost always bigger than the between culture differences. What does that mean? Let me show you.
Okay, first I will show you this one question we asked which was how bad is it to be loud in public places and we asked people to rate it from you know either not at all bad, one on the scale, all the way up to a six on the scale, extremely bad. So my answer would be not at all bad, I don't mind people being loud, and here are the answers from a bunch of other people. We got tons of answers, you can see they're starting to pile up in certain spots because certain answers are more common than the other ones. Now let's toss me out because I'm not part of this data. These data are actually from students in Vancouver and Beijing.
Now you can start to see that their answers are a little bit different and if I put in the average there you can see that that average is different between the Beijing students and the Vancouver students. But also look at the differences between individuals. The most extreme Vancouver individual and the most extreme Vancouveran individual on the other side, that difference is a lot bigger than the between culture difference, which is the difference between the averages.
And what is a bar graph? That is illustrating only the difference between the averages. Let me show you.
So if I want to make this histogram into a bar graph, what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it on its side. So now our scale is going from not at all bad all the way up to extremely bad. And now I'm going to make that average more obvious.
So I might extend it. I will draw a nice big bar down from the average to the bottom because a bar graph is just a picture and it's just a picture of the averages. And if I'm going to put this in an article, I am not going to show you those histograms because they're way too complicated. I just made those individual differences disappear. But remember those individual differences are still there.
They're just not being shown in the graph. And in my article, I may even expand it a little bit, make the scale a little bit different, because I want to make it really clear, I might change the color, that there are big cultural differences, and they are important, which they are, but remember, that bar graph is just a simplification, it's just an average. And if we put those histograms back in, make them smaller again, you can remember.
It's only an expression of the average. Now, in this case, you can see that there are significant cultural differences, and there are big within-culture differences. Now, that sometimes depends on what kind of question you're asking. So, let's say I ask about stealing.
Here, you can see that actually there are no between-culture differences at all, although there are still a lot of individual differences. Now let me just show you again, let's lay it back on its side and add in a couple more cities. Another Chinese city, Hong Kong.
Another western city, Melbourne, Australia. And you can see still no cultural differences. Lots of within culture differences. And then again it depends what you're asking. What if I ask how bad it is to kill people?
Here, no cultural differences, thank goodness. Also No individual differences, almost, except for a couple crazy people. And you can see, depending on the question here, no cultural differences, almost no individual differences either, almost no within culture differences either. But sometimes the question you ask may show differences that agree perfectly with your stereotypes of eastern western differences. However, remember, even though this fits with your stereotype, is every individual in that culture the same?
Absolutely not. The difference goes from one extreme to the other. And another thing, the average answer is actually not the same as... The modal or the most common answer, okay? Stats geek moment, mean and mode are different.
And so you see that the average doesn't mean the most common answer. It doesn't mean what everybody answers. It's the average.
What does that tell us? Let's look again at disrespecting your parents, another one that would fit with your stereotypes. That average is showing you something about the social environment that we are in. It shows you what kinds of things you're hearing most often, what opinions are around you, but it doesn't show you what I, this individual, think, right?
So if you want to know that you have to talk with me and ask me. It also doesn't show some other things that might be cultural influences, like what does it mean to disrespect your parents? What kind of behaviors do you show? Or what else do we know about you if you're the sort of person who disrespects your parents? That may also differ by color.
So culture is an influence. In this case you can think of it like an attraction, something that kind of might pull you in that direction, or it might be like a wind and you might be kind of resisting it and trying to push against it. So every individual may still be different but you are still also influenced by your cultural environment.
So remember all those beautiful bar graphs, they show really interesting cultural differences. It's really interesting to try to figure out why those differences are there, but they do not tell you very much about every individual in that culture. So always remember, don't stereotype, because the within cultural differences are almost always bigger than between culture differences.
Thank you.