I'm in charge here
One way in which cultures differ from one another is in what Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden–Turner call "locus of control" — in essence: Who makes things happen, me or the universe? I've discussed this in a previous post: "internally directed" cultures see individual will as the main factor, while "externally directed" cultures see circumstances as the main factor.This difference shows up throughout Chinese and American responses to the "draft" question I wrote about in the last post, repeated here:
The government decides to go to war. Chris is drafted into the army to fight, but he feels strongly that war is wrong. What will Chris say and do? What should he do?
I have dubbed the cultural model that embodies Americans' internally-directed nature "You Can't Change Me": People are who they are, and they will do what interests them. Especially young people. Trying to force people to do things they don’t want to do will have the opposite result.With regard to Chris, our draftee, here is what some of the Americans have to say:
E-13 What would Chris say and do? Okay I agree with you. He'll probably try to get out of it, he'll probably say, oh, I have to go finish my college degree. But I think if the government is insistent that he go to war, that he would do it. But then he wouldn't go a hundered percent.
E-21 Chris can still say something like, I can be governed by the government, I'm certainly not going to go against this war. But personally I'm against this war, and I feel war is wrong. And in that case I wouldn't be a good addition to the army anyway.
E-22 There's a tension there because the government isn't interested in having doves in the army, ’cause it'd almost be like having people that are interested in fighting in your army to kill somebody and they're not gonna go all out a hundred and ten percent.
E-23 I think that he will really speak out and try to find a way to get out of it, because they don't want people to fight the war if they're completely against it. What good is it to have people on your side that are fighting for you that first of all don't even want to be there, they don't believe in your cause, they have no desire.
E-26 I mean if they're going to fight the war they should use people who want to fight the war. I mean I think if it was that important to people, they would get volunteers to the extent that people agree with it.
E-25 Well I think to a certain extent you can't really make people fight if they don't want to.
The last sentence by E-25 sums it all up perfectly: “You can’t really make people fight if they don’t want to.” Taking the American position to an extreme, we could say, “You can’t make people do anything if they don’t want to.”Per usual, this model, You Can’t Change Me, is perfectly comprehensible in both cultural worlds. It’s just given much higher priority by the Americans. The one time it shows up in the Chinese responses it is instantly rebutted:
C-14 He definitely won’t be a good soldier.
C-15 No, no, no.
C-14 At the same time he’s killing people he’ll be thinking that war is wrong.
C-15 This question is too difficult for you. It’s not that I can necessarily give a good answer, because…I don’t know how to answer this.
C-14 This is hard, this…what should he do?
C-15 That depends on what you put first. There’s an order to the things he’s facing. Traditionally in China the country comes first, but I believe it’s also this way in America, so it’s really simple. He will go fight, and he will be a very good soldier in the war.
That’s all there is to it: there may be some conflict there, but Duty to Country wins, hands down.
In the next post we'll take a look at how this internal versus external locus of control orientation fits into the two very different Chinese and American cultural model systems governing relationships between people and their environments.