In her text Negotiating Globally: How to Negotiate Deals, Resolve Disputes, and Make Decisions across Cultural Boundaries, Jeanne M. Brett (2014) described three prototypes of culture ^[1].

It has been suggested that the Edward Hall’s concept of high- and low-context culture neglected cultures in regions like the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Latin America which didn’t neatly fit into Hall’s binary framework. Brett’s framework departs from high- and low-cultural contexts by suggesting three prototypes: dignity, face, and honor.  According to Brett’s framework, Western European and North American regions have a dignity culture, Asia has a face culture, and the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America have an honor culture.

What is Culture?

Culture is the unique character of a group¹. Individuals have personalities; groups have cultures. You can see culture in the patterns of peoples’ beliefs, attitudes, norms, and behaviors as well as in the nature of the social, economic, political, legal, and religious institutions that structure and organize groups.

Anthropologists suggest that culture emerges because people are faced repeatedly with similar social problems², for example, the problem of negotiation when people who are interdependent have conflicting interests. People develop procedures, such as a negotiation strategy, to solve those problems of social interaction. Then when similar problems arise later, people repeat the same procedures and teach others to use them. The result is a cultural norm, or standard of appropriate behavior, that guides effective social interaction. For example, in some cultures people greet each other by kissing, others by bowing, and others by shaking hands. All these different greeting behaviors are equally functional within culture; all signal recognition and respect within culture.

The important thing to understand about the different cultural norms that guide social interaction is that one culture’s norms are no better or worse than another culture’s norms. The norms are just different. Understandably, people are most comfortable with the norms they learn at an early age, because by following those norms they can get along fine socially without a lot of thought and effort. The problems arise when one tries to “get along” in a culture in which norms for social interaction are quite different from those one is used to. Greeting via cheek kissing is not widely practiced in Japan; bowing is not widely practiced in France. Violating a culture’s greeting norms has the ironic effect of being disrespectful when your intention was just the opposite, to signal respect.

Greeting norms also provide a ready example for understanding cultural prototypes. A cultural prototype describes the way that many people in a culture act: many Japanese bow in greeting; many French cheek kiss when greeting. But not everyone in a particular culture follows the prototype. This is why scholars and laymen like to represent culture in terms of a bell curve. The area under the bell is the central tendency or prototype.

We’ve drawn two bell curves in Exhibit 2.1 to represent cultural differences in greeting behavior in Japan and France, although the base or x-axis of the figure can represent any cultural characteristic. Here we’re showing physical distance in greeting behavior. Japan bell curve to the right shows high physical distance in greeting behavior; for example, bowing. The France bell curve to the left shows physical distance in greeting behavior as low; for example, kissing.

The bell curves in Exhibit 2.1 illustrate four important features of cultural prototypes: central tendency, its location, cultural tightness-looseness, and cultural overlap. The central tendency of a cultural prototype is the 95 percent confidence interval around the central point of the curve. It’s the unshaded area within each culture’s curve in the exhibit. What you see immediately is that Japan’s bell curve is higher, tighter, and located more to the right than France’s, meaning that physically distant greeting behavior, such as bowing, is commonly practiced in Japan. France’s bell curve in contrast is lower, looser, and located more to the left than Japan’s, suggesting that greeting behavior is generally physically close in France, but varies quite widely, because most people exchange kisses but some embrace and others shake hands.

Cultural tightness refers to the extent to which cultural norms are relatively inflexible and formal, generating little within-culture variation, as illustrated in the Japan bell curve in the exhibit. Cultural looseness refers to the extent to which cultural norms are relatively flexible, generating improvisation and interpretation and greater variation of behavior within the culture, as reflected by the France bell curve.³ As a result of cultural tightness-looseness, the cultural prototype or central tendency is going to be a better predictor of peoples’ behavior in a tight culture than in a loose culture.

The exhibit also illustrates cultural overlap between France and Japan. This might be greeting behavior at the point of shaking hands. Some cultures are more similar than others. In our example of physical distance in greeting behavior, we chose two cultures, Japan and France, that are quite different. If we had shown Japan and South Korea, the two countries’ bell curves would have overlapped in the bow region of the graph. If we had chosen France and Italy, the two countries’ bell curves would have overlapped in the kiss region of the graph.

One reality of culture that Exhibit 2.1 doesn’t illustrate is that cultural boundaries are not as neat as the two adjacent curves might suggest. Culture is rather like a Matryoshka (one of those Russian nesting dolls): when you open the larger doll, there are smaller dolls inside. There are always cultures within cultures within cultures.

Three Prototypes: Dignity, Face, and Honor Cultures

Most people are familiar with the East-West cultural divide that distinguishes ways of thinking and governing, grounded in Confucian philosophy versus Aristotelian logic. This distinction between East-West cultural prototypes remains valid today, but it ignores vast geographic regions of the world, such as the Middle East and Latin America, where global negotiators are also active. Fortunately, recent cultural analysis has identified a third cultural prototype that is worth our attention for its unique characteristics and their implications for negotiation. This new analysis distinguishes among dignity culture, familiar as Western culture, face culture, familiar as East Asian cultures, and honor culture, which is the prototypical culture in the Middle East, Latin America, and North Africa.

There is no single explanation for why a certain cultural prototype should be located in a certain part of the world. However, scholars generally agree that differing political solutions (for example, strong or weak rule of law), economic systems (for example, controlled or uncontrolled markets), and social solutions (for example, individualism versus collectivism) emerged in response to geographic challenges (including, for example, access to abundant versus scarce agricultural crops) and demographic challenges (for example, population density).⁴ We suggest that this dignity, face, and honor culture typology is relevant to negotiation because people in these three different types of cultures analyze social problems rather differently.

Exhibit 2.2 describes dignity, face, and honor cultures in terms of six sets of characteristics: self-worth, power and status, sensitivity and response to insults, confrontation style, trust, and mindset. These are by no means the only characteristics that distinguish these cultures, but they are ones that are particularly relevant to how people negotiate. Self-worth refers to a person’s sense of his or her own value in society. Power refers to a person’s ability to influence an outcome. Status refers to a person’s position in a social hierarchy. Sensitivity and response to insults refers to the way a person is affected by and responds to another’s offensive behavior. Confrontation style refers to how a person responds when faced with defiance, opposition, or hostility. Trust is the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to another person.⁵ Mindset refers to the way people reason and process information.⁶

As you begin reading about the dignity, face, and honor culture prototypes, you are likely going to be thinking: but I know Americans who are not like that; I know Chinese who are not like that. Remember though, we are not describing particular individuals but cultural prototypes, or central tendencies of thought and action that have developed historically in those cultures and still hold, even if not practiced by all people in that culture. We should assume neither that all people in a particular honor culture, for example Iran, follow all norms of honor culture, nor that all honor cultures, for example Iran and Mexico, are the same with respect to each of the characteristics described in Exhibit 2.2. Remember, too, those Russian dolls. There are subcultures within cultures; not everyone is going to act exactly like the cultural prototype. For example, in dignity cultures people generally are self-interested and they generally are not shy to negotiate to achieve their goals, yet we know that American women tend not to negotiate their employment contracts.⁷ Our purpose in discussing dignity, face, and honor cultural prototypes is to help you see cultural differences that may affect negotiation strategy.

Dignity Cultures

Dignity culture is the prototype of Western society.⁸ The key characteristic of dignity culture is the emphasis on the individual. Self-worth—one’s value to society in dignity culture—is self-determined or intrinsic, independent from social status, and therefore quite stable even in social situations that are much more threatening to self-worth in other cultures. In such an environment, people are quite concerned for their own welfare, and rather less concerned about the welfare of others.

The social independence of dignity means that there is no presumption of social hierarchy in dignity cultures; each person is as good as any other. People in dignity cultures view themselves as equal to every other member of the society, and this view is reflected in the egalitarian governments and market economies characteristic of these cultures.⁹ Historically, the ideology of market economies and dignity (that is, intrinsic sense of worth) have developed together in environments that had abundant resources, low population density, and strong governments that could protect individuals’ property rights from violence.

Interactions in Dignity Cultures

When self-worth is intrinsic, not socially determined, it is not easily threatened in social interactions such as negotiations; in other words, your refusal to accept my offers is a reflection on you not me. People in dignity cultures are pretty good at maintaining their sense of self-worth, regardless of the way others behave toward them.¹¹ If an insult does not damage one’s self-worth, there is no need to reciprocate the insult. Indeed, intrinsic self-worth provides the resilience to turn back insults, for example by implying that it is the insulter who lacks dignity (Who are you to say that to me?).¹² Nevertheless, people in dignity cultures certainly care about respect.¹³ And, consistent with their intrinsic sense of self-worth, they are likely to perceive conflicts in terms of violations of individual rights and autonomy.¹⁴ At the same time, dignity cultures afford several factors, less present in other cultures, that insulate members from the need to retaliate. As we have discussed, one insulating factor is the resiliency of dignity that resides largely in the self, rather than depending on social support. Strong norms in dignity cultures that encourage direct, rational, and unemotional confrontation of conflict are a second insulating factor.

A third insulating factor is the rather well-developed rule of law that is common in dignity cultures.¹⁵ Dignity cultures acknowledge that the prevalent norm of self-interest¹⁶ will lead to a loose culture that needs some reigning in. The rule of law in these societies channels and restricts conflict when self-interest gets out of hand, but still allows for the direct confrontation of disputing parties in courts and alternative dispute resolution systems.

Trust in Dignity Cultures

People in dignity cultures tend to be trusting of others. They trust swiftly and on faith,¹⁷ believing that others deserve to be trusted until they prove they are not trustworthy.¹⁸ The belief in trust is bolstered by the norm of reciprocity—treat others as they treat  you.¹⁹ People in dignity cultures largely assume that when they treat others as trustworthy, others will treat them as trustworthy. Trusting signals integrity and trustworthiness. So long as enhancing the welfare of others by trusting promotes, or at least does not hurt, their own self-interest, they will do so.

Relying on positive reciprocity to manage interdependence is also wholly consistent with the relatively egalitarian distribution of power in dignity cultures. It’s not easy to get others to do what you want in egalitarian cultures; they push back with their own ideas! When people cannot rely on status and authority for power, they fall back on trading and reciprocity to get things done. “If you’ll do this for me, I’ll do that for you.” Then when what they have to trade isn’t enough for the other, instead of being insulted, they just go off and look for someone else to trade with.

An Analytic Mindset

People in dignity cultures tend to use Aristotelian logic when they reason.²⁰ They break up problems such as negotiations into separate elements or issues, prioritize, and search for logical and linear rules to explain causality. Abstract linear thinking is so pervasive in Western culture that people often don’t notice its use. Yet it is the model underlying the five-paragraph essay that American high schools use to teach writing. It is what my lawyer husband and lawyer daughter are using when I eavesdrop on their case discussions. It is the way dignity culture negotiators organize information. It underlies the structure and rules for building a Negotiation Planning Document.

Face Cultures

Face culture is the prototype of East Asian societies.²¹ The key characteristic of face culture is the emphasis on the interests of the collective, relative to those of the individual. (By collective we mean the groups to which people belong.) Self-worth—one’s value to society in face culture—is socially conferred. Face depends on a person’s relative position in a stable social hierarchy, and on fulfillment of the person’s role obligations in that society.²² Thus people are very concerned with the status and welfare of the groups from which they derive face.

Face cultures are very stable hierarchical social structures. The fundamental group in face culture is the family, and the unequal hierarchical relationships that are characteristic of families reflect the unequal hierarchical social structure of the rest of face societies. ²³ Face cultures consist of hierarchies within hierarchies, rather like those Russian nesting dolls. Historically, face cultures have developed in densely populated geographical areas, where their stable hierarchical social structures facilitated the cooperation necessary for organized food production. Although the modern
East Asian nations of Japan and South Korea are democratic, their social structures remain very hierarchical.

Interactions in Face Cultures

Because self-worth in face cultures is a function of a person’s relative social position in a group, it is not too easily threatened unless the status of the group also is threatened. Japanese, for example, view conflict as violations of duties and obligations.²⁴ In addition, three characteristics of face cultures help to preserve the social status quo: norms for harmony, norms of indirect confrontation, and that ubiquitous hierarchy.²⁵ Norms for harmony increase the threshold of people’s tolerance for insult or conflict. Norms of indirect confrontation deter aggressive retaliation of insults and conflict. Hierarchy provides an institutionalized, although indirect, channel for face-saving resolution of conflict. In face cultures, due to deference to hierarchy there is no loss of face when being told no by a higher-status member of the society.

Although these norms for harmony, indirect confrontation, and deference to hierarchy bring stability to ongoing social relationships in face cultures, as we will see, they do not govern the process of negotiating new social relationships. New social relationships require determining parties’ status vis-à-vis each other. Negotiation is the opportunity to make that determination. In a face culture, once an agreement with its implications for roles and responsibilities has been reached, the relationship is likely to be very stable. Do not be surprised that in face cultures negotiations of new social relationships are highly contested.

Trust in Face Cultures

Trust functions differently in face and dignity cultures, even though it means the same thing. Pretty much everywhere in the world, a trustworthy person is viewed as someone who is reliable, benevolent, responsible, and dependable, and has integrity.²⁶ However, the environmental factors that make a person trustworthy are quite different in the two types of cultures.²⁷ Smooth social interaction depends on people being able to predict with some accuracy how others are going to behave. In face cultures, monitoring and sanctioning by institutions such as family, community, church, and state mean that people generally can predict how others will behave. Scholars have data to show that such institutions serve as reliable external guarantors of individual behavior.²⁸ So as long as institutional surveillance is in place, there is little need to rely on interpersonal trust.²⁹ Knowing that surveillance is present is enough to cause people to act as if they trusted each other.³⁰ But scholars argue that although people’s resulting trust-like behavior reflects their faith in conformity in the presence of institutional surveillance, it does not portend a willingness to extend trust indiscriminately and across situations.³¹ Thus face and dignity cultures bring very different perspectives on trust to the task of negotiating new social relationships.

A Holistic Mindset

People in face cultures tend to reason and analyze problems holistically as a result of their Confucian cultural heritage.³² When they analyze a problem, they focus both on the problem and on the context in which it is embedded. They are highly likely to consider what changes in the context may have caused the problem, and they are likely to search for solutions to problems by comparing a problem and its context’s similarities and differences to other problems and contexts they may have encountered before. A holistic mindset relies more strongly on experience based knowledge than does the analytic mindset.

One interesting test that distinguishes between the two types of mindsets involves showing people pictures of animals in incongruent contexts, for example a sheep in the lobby of a building. When asked to describe the picture, face culture (holistically minded) people tend to talk about both the sheep and its discrepant context; by contrast, dignity culture (analytically minded) people tend to describe the attributes of the sheep, largely ignoring the incongruous context.

I see this holistic mindset in action in the papers that my Asian graduate students write when they first begin studying in the United States. They write well and their ideas are good, but their papers gradually build to their key insight, exploring various perspectives before proposing a thesis of their own. My American students start the paper with their own key insight and then systematically and linearly unpack it.

Another place I see this dignity and face difference in mindset is when negotiators address multiple issues. An American manager told me about negotiating in Korea. At the end of the first day, he said, “We were elated! We had covered four of the issues on our agenda. We thought we were on a roll! On the second day the Koreans wanted to start over discussing the issues we’d already discussed. We wanted to move on.”³³ The Americans in this negotiation were working with that linear mindset and swift trust. The Koreans were approaching the negotiation in a much more holistic and slow trust manner. In wanting to revisit issues already discussed, the Koreans were signaling that having talked about an issue did not mean having resolved it out of context from the other issues. They may possibly also have wanted to hear how consistently the Americans would talk about the issues the second day.

Honor Cultures

Honor culture societies are distributed geographically around the world and constitute our third prototype. Honor culture is characteristic of Middle Eastern and North African cultures, Latin American cultures, and to some extent, Southern European cultures. ³⁴ In honor cultures, self-worth is an individual’s estimate of his own value as socially claimed from and recognized by society.³⁵ Thus self-worth in honor cultures combines elements of self-worth as defined in dignity cultures with elements of self-worth as defined in face cultures.

Honor cultures generally have hierarchical social structures,³⁶ but for several reasons, those social structures are relatively unstable.³⁷ Historically, honor cultures developed in areas with poor agricultural resources, economies based on herding, and weak central governments that were not able to protect people’s property rights.³⁸ In these economically challenging and unstable environments tribes, clans, and families competed and contested with each other to establish social dominance and exert control over resources.³⁹ The modern history of several Middle Eastern and Latin American countries reveals such contests: cycles of dictatorship and repression, followed by revolutions or reforms; brief periods of political openness, followed by coups or other events that establish new structures of power and politics that are strongly hierarchical.⁴⁰

Interactions in Honor Cultures

In honor cultures, where social hierarchies are unstable and frequently contested, self-worth can manifest in rather different ways depending on whether honor is being attacked or acknowledged. There is substantial recent research showing that people in honor cultures respond to insult aggressively, defensively, and directly to protect their self-worth.⁴¹ Yet because honor is conferred by others, honor is also displayed to others (particularly strangers) by behavior that is trustworthy⁴² and gracious.⁴³

Trust in Honor Cultures

To be honorable is to be trustworthy. However, the contested social relations that characterize many honor cultures mean that trust may not be supported by social norms or institutional structures, or justified by norms of positive reciprocity. Trust is restricted to the chosen few. Fear of being taken advantage of means that people in honor cultures tend to be slow, not swift, as in dignity cultures, to extend interpersonal trust to strangers. And honor cultures lack the stable institutional structures that provide the reliable external guarantors of trustworthy behavior characteristic of face cultures. In social situations in which it is difficult to anticipate whether or not the other party will be trustworthy, the defensive response in honor cultures is to mistrust.

In honor cultures, trusting means putting your self-worth in the hands of others. If you trust and your trust is reciprocated, then you gain honor because your self-worth is ratified. But there is the huge risk associated with trusting. If your trust is not reciprocated, there is both a social loss of social face and also a personal loss of self-worth—I must not have deserved to be trusted. How different lack of reciprocation is in honor culture than in dignity culture. In dignity culture the failure to reciprocate a trust initiative reflects poorly on the recipient, not the initiator.

A Mindset More Analytic than Holistic

Logically, the prevalent mindset of negotiators from honor cultures should be more analytic than holistic, although frankly there is not yet good research on this issue. The reason is that the modern educational systems in Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East, and on the Indian subcontinent, are steeped in the European tradition, not these cultures’ ancient civilizations. The Spanish and Portuguese brought Aristotelian logic to Latin America. The current Mexican school system is patterned on France’s. The British were in Egypt, Palestine, and India, and the French in North Africa and Lebanon until the middle of the twentieth century. Young men and some women from these parts of the world are routinely sent to universities in Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Most, but not all, of the people from honor cultures you encounter across the negotiating table are likely to be very familiar with analytic thinking. At the same time they will also be influenced by the philosophical and moral worldviews of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and Latin America that flourished economically and politically in these regions long before the Europeans arrived and that were in many ways more similar to civilizations in China than to those in Europe. You will see social vestiges of this heritage in the strength and importance of families and religious institutions and the spirituality of the people in these modern societies. You also may see intellectual vestiges of the way people thought holistically about problems. For example, these ancient Middle Eastern and Latin American civilizations shared pictographic writing with the Chinese.

The Value of this Three-Culture Framework

Understanding self-worth, power and status, sensitivity to insults, confrontation style, trust, and mindset from the perspective of dignity, face, and honor culture means that when you see people acting quite like one of these cultural prototypes, you can avoid interpreting their behavior through the lens of your own culture and see it instead as an expression of their own culture. This has at least three very positive benefits for the global negotiator.

First, you can reduce the risk of jeopardizing the negotiation due to misinterpretation of your counterpart’s behaviors. For example, in Japan it is not the norm to look a counterpart directly in the eye. Western culture negotiators, used to eye contact and unaware of this Japanese social norm, can easily fall into the cultural misinterpretation trap, inferring that their Japanese counterpart is not trustworthy.

Second, recognizing the cultural source of your counterpart’s extremely frustrating behaviors should increase your tolerance for those behaviors. When you understand that the behavior is cultural, you can see that (a) your counterparts are acting normally for their culture, (b) they are not acting specifically to frustrate you, and (c) they may not even know how your culture would interpret their behavior. This awareness is what Infosys-engineer Junichi Yoshida was trying to accomplish when he shared the comparisons in Exhibit 2.3 with Indian and Japanese software project engineers who were trying to improve their communications with each other.

Third, when you can recognize that the counterpart’s behavior is cultural and not personal, you should be able to be more flexible in your choice of negotiation strategy. For example, a U.S. software engineer working on a project for an Israeli client reported how frustrated he was by the Israeli’s different way of approaching issues and discussing them. “There is something pretty common to the Israeli culture, they like to argue. I tend to try and collaborate more and it got very stressful for me until I figured out how to kind of merge the cultures.”⁴⁴