studies Archives - understand-culture

Demographics

According to a report by the Census Bureau, the United States is expected to be a majority-minority nation by 2043. Within the next 50 years, nearly one in three U.S. residents would be Hispanic. Within the same time span, the Asian-American population will double from 15.9 million people to 34.4 million, and the African-American population is projected to increase by 20 million people.

From 2024 to 2060, the non-Hispanic white population will fall by nearly 20 million people, and will make up 43 percent of the nation’s total population by 2060. In 2011, the population of the United States was comprised of the following: White persons not Hispanic (63.4 percent), Black (13.1 percent), American Indian (1.2 percent), Asian-American (5.0 percent), Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (0.2 percent), Two or more races (2.3 percent), Hispanic or Latino Origin (16.7 percent).

In diverse cultures people approach potentially sensitive topics indirectly.

Colleague, not Facebook friend

In 2010 the online-career portal monster.de conducted a study regarding German behavior in social online networks. 61% of people said that they are not friends with their colleagues via social media.

Only 27% indicated that they talk to their colleagues on Facebook. 12% of the survey participants are friends with their colleagues on Facebook. However, most have different profile settings for colleagues. The survey results suggest that Germans separate their private life and their professional life.

Citibank survey

A recent survey of Citibank branches in four countries (the United States, Germany, China, and Spain) was conducted to determine the most effective persuasion methods for employees to use in order to convince their colleagues to do a favor for them. All four countries had very different results.

The survey showed that Americans are more likely to be persuaded to help their colleagues if there’s something in it for them, or if they owe their colleagues a favor. They tended to ask questions like “What will I get out of this?” and “What has this person done for me?”

Germans, on the other hand, were more likely to be persuaded to help if the favor stayed within the rules of the organization. They tended to ask questions like “According to the official regulations, am I supposed to help?”

Overqualification

According to a recent study, almost half of all employed Americans with college degrees are overqualified for their jobs. In 2010, 15% of taxi drivers had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 1% in 1970, and 25% of retail sales clerks had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 5% in 1970.

In fact, U.S. overqualification has become such a large problem that in 2013, The Globalist published an article titled “The U.S. Overqualification Crisis: Why the United States is looking to Germany for answers on higher education.”

Now, many degree programs encourage American students to avoid doctorates and/or other certifications because having these will make it harder for the students to find jobs. Engineers are warned not to get certified as Professional Engineers (PEs,) because companies typically hire only a handful of licensed PEs, but hire many more unlicensed engineers.

American employers have several reasons why they avoid hiring people who are overqualified for a position. Some of their biggest reasons include:

Higher salary expectations – someone with more qualifications is likely to expect to be paid more money.

Promotion expectations – someone with more qualifications might accept a job that’s “beneath them” only because they expect to be promoted quickly to a job that’s more deserving of their higher skills.

Upstaging – someone who has more qualifications and/or experience than their boss might have difficulty following orders.

Short term – someone who is overqualified is likely to lose interest in their position, and won’t stay for very long.

Power to the engineers!

In the most recent poll on occupational prestige in Germany conducted by the Allensbach Institute engineers and university professors took seventh place, behind physicians and craftsmen, but well ahead of politicians and journalists.

26% of Germans polled noted a high degree of respect for the engineering profession. No wonder, for Germans define individual prestige based on technical (specialized) knowledge.

Almost every third supervisory board member of a DAX30 company is an engineer by training. Industrial heavyweights like Volkswagen and DaimlerBenz have always been run by engineers, to the dismay, as the magazine Spiegel wrote, of those colleagues with a business or legal background.

Impatience

According to a survey conducted in 2015, even though almost 80% of Americans consider themselves patient, a vast majority of them behave in ways that display incredible impatience. For example, 96% of Americans will consume food/drink that they know is hot enough to burn them rather than wait for it to cool. Additionally, 71% frequently exceed the speed limit and more than 50% won’t wait on hold for more than one minute.

Fail Fast, Fail Often

“Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere”. By John Donohue. The New Yorker. May 31, 2015.

“Discussions about failure may come more easily in America in part because our businesspeople are so good at it. The failure rate for startups, using a yardstick in which investors lose everything (i.e., all of the company’s assets are liquidated), is between thirty and forty per cent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

The rate is seventy to eighty per cent if failure is defined as not meeting the projected return on investment, and ninety to ninety-five per cent if it is measured by failing to beat a declared projection.

Despite these statistics, Americans remain remarkably optimistic about the process—last year, venture-capital companies staked forty-eight billion dollars in pursuit of big returns. And the fact that these investments are concentrated in a relatively small number of companies has not seemed to inspire much fear in prospective entrepreneurs.

According to a study done by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a project run by Babson College and the London Business School, in 2014 among respondents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four who were not already running their own businesses, just thirty per cent reported that fear of failure would stop them from starting one.

And more than half of those Americans surveyed believed that there are good opportunities to strike out on one’s own.

Citizens exposed

Towards the end of 2014, the German Postbank conducted a study with the goal of identifying the good policies which Germans enforce with regard to their financial matters. The results were summarized in article titled When it comes to money, Germans are bureaucrats who are afraid to take risks:

“Like a pillar of economic wisdom, the desire to have a higher income looms above all other factors. The remaining results are actually more reflective of the ‘financial illiteracy’, which the Germans are already often credited with.

In this way, the study exposed the citizens as being fearful bureaucrats, who above all just want to increase their personal wealth through taxation, saving, and maintaining better control of their finances, rather than earn money through smart investing, or saving for retirement.”

Risikoscheu – A fear of risks: The attribute of a decision-maker to prefer the path of lesser risk – and thereby most minimal loss – when confronted with several alternatives which have an equal anticipated gain. This may mean waiting longer for the same reward, or even settling for a lesser gain, if the chances are greater that it will be received.

Popup surveys

A Call Center sends an email to a customer they just served, asking for quick feedback on that service. Websites have popups which give users a chance to respond immediately to what they like and don‘t like. Social networking sites like Facebook have their little thumbs up and down symbols on every page.

Political parties, as well as companies, are constantly asking voters, or consumers, what they like, don‘t like, how they feel, what‘s good bad, up down, right wrong, left right. Marketing in America is too a large degree understood as finding out what people want.

Americans selling something – products, services, political messages – want to know as much as they can about their target groups. Target. It‘s a sign of American customer-orientation. Or, from the perspective of other cultures, customer overorientation.

It is also a sign for the very strong inclination of Americans to quantify human behavior, to use statistics and measurements in order to understand it. Finally, it is a sign of how much Americans value, or take seriously, unreflected impressions and opinions given just after someone has experienced a product, service or an interaction.

Common and Unoriginal

According to Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, authors of the book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, American culture is solidarity-based – which means that it is based on creating a sense of equality and belonging. It is because of this that Americans seek to find a way to compliment each other for very basic things – to form bonds and a sense of belonging.

Additionally, in 1981, Nessa Wolfson published a study on the use of compliments in various cultures, and her assessment of American complimenting culture, where compliments are “as cheap as chips,” was that “the most striking feature of compliments in American English is their total lack of originality.”

Wolfson wrote that 23% of American compliments include the word “nice,” 20% include “good,” and 54% follow the pattern: “noun/phrase is/looks (really) adjective.”