My first research project dates back to the late 1990s, when I was working in Bonn for the Christian Democrats, then the majority party in the German Bundestag. Helmut Kohl was Chancellor, Wolfgang Schäuble was Majority Leader. I reported directly to Dr. Schäuble on matters concerning Germany’s relations with the United States.
In this role I repeatedly observed how differently Germans and Americans communicated, presented, and persuaded — how they constructed and delivered their arguments.
I had already co‑led five-day intensive intercultural training seminars for Germans preparing for long-term assignments in the U.S., where Persuasion was one of the core topics. But now, inside German politics, I was witnessing these differences at the highest level.
It was in this environment that I first applied the structured, evidence‑driven approach that would later evolve into UC’s formal research method, setting out to answer a single, deceptively simple question: When, where, and how do Germans and Americans develop their fundamental approach to persuasion?
I began at the earliest stage of learning. In both countries, I interviewed kindergarten teachers. In the United States, children as young as four or five practice Show and Tell — standing at the front of the room, sharing an object, and telling its story to classmates.
I then spoke with teachers at middle and high schools, asking when students first give formal presentations and what they are taught. I requested lesson plans and materials. At the university level, I reached out to professors, posing the same questions, and drew on my own experience earning a master’s degree in Berlin for additional insight.
Next, I contacted learning and development departments at major global companies to understand how they trained employees in rhetoric, presentation skills, and selling. I asked for course outlines, training decks, and internal guidelines.
I also examined the commercial side of persuasion: I searched Amazon for the top-selling books on presenting, selling, and persuading — both in Germany and in the United States.
Persuasion also lives in the public sphere, so I studied advertising in all its forms: television, radio, print, and online. Selling is persuasion in its purest form — a direct reflection of a national culture’s approach to convincing others.
Across these sources — education, corporate training, literature, and advertising — I gathered what I considered obvious, visible, and irrefutable evidence. I then sorted, grouped, and analyzed it, watching for patterns. I focused both on how each culture persuades and on the differences between them.
One striking example emerged:
Germans separate message from messenger: in professional settings, a presenter deliberately steps into the background so the message itself takes center stage. The belief is that arguments should speak for themselves.
Americans, by contrast, link message and messenger: the content, its form, and the presenter form a unity, with the messenger’s confidence, personality, and credibility central to persuasion.
The consequences of this difference are profound. For Americans, the German style can feel impersonal, abstract, even uninspiring; distancing oneself from one’s message may read as risk-averse or disinterested. “If he himself is not clearly convinced by his own message, why should I be?”
Conversely, Germans often regard the American approach with ambivalence. They may find it motivating and engaging, yet also suspect that appeals to emotion betray a lack of rational substance: “There must be a reason why he is appealing to our emotions instead of to our reason.”
This was just one of several core differences I uncovered between the two cultures’ approaches to persuasion. The project taught me that meaningful cultural analysis demands time, effort, and a willingness to go deep and wide — to ask the right questions, gather the right evidence, analyze it carefully, and above all, recognize the patterns that explain the why behind the behavior.
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