Lutz wasn’t the first to uncover a society where annoyance was anathema. In the 1960s, an anthropologist named Jean Briggs spent more than a year with the Utkuhikhalingmiut[3] Eskimos in northern Canada. She persuaded one of the families to essentially adopt her so that she could experience, as well as study, the culture.
Like the Ifaluk, the Utkuhikhalingmiut frowned on expressions of negative emotion. Indeed, someone who showed even a trace of annoyance faced silence, loneliness, and rejection—something Briggs learned the hard way. She made the mistake of saying something to a fisherman who had damaged an Utkuhikhalingmiut fishing net. She had to endure months of the silent treatment, a distressing experience.
The notion that emotions are shaped by culture is becoming widely accepted by people who study such things, and it explains a lot about why Americans find people from other countries annoying, and vice versa.
Hazel Rose Markus is a psychologist at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 1991, she and Shinobu Kitayama wrote a seminal paper titled “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” In it, they said,
In America, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” In Japan, “the nail that stands out gets pounded down.” American parents who are trying to induce their children to eat their suppers are fond of saying “think of the starving kids in Ethiopia, and appreciate how lucky you are to be different from them.” Japanese parents are likely to say “Think about the farmer who worked so hard to produce this rice for you; if you don’t eat it, he will feel bad, for his efforts will have been in vain.”… A small Texas corporation seeking to elevate productivity told its employees to look in the mirror and say “I am beautiful” 100 times before coming to work each day. Employees of a Japanese supermarket that was recently opened in New Jersey were instructed to begin the day by holding hands and telling each other that “he” or “she is beautiful.”
Markus and Kitayama argue that these contrary points of view help illuminate a fundamental difference in how Eastern and Western cultures conceive of what psychologists call “self.” Your concept of self determines how you perceive and respond to your environment.
In the Western world—at least, in the parts of the Western world that Markus has studied—you are supposed to be in control of your environment. “You think about yourself as independent, separate from others,” says Markus. “You should be in charge of your actions, you should be freely making choices, and you should be influencing your world. Control is key. And when you can’t have that kind of influence over your environment, over other people, over your world, it’s very irritating and annoying, because that’s what you should be doing, to be a good self.”
On the other hand, according to Markus, Japanese and other Asian cultures have an interdependent concept of self. Rather than being unique, solitary individuals who are out for what is best for them and them alone, they see themselves as a node in a network. The sense of self is less individualistic and more collective.
Markus’s coauthor Shinobu Kitayama has lived in both cultures and has an acute appreciation of how these different views of self govern behavior. Kitayama is now a professor at the University of Michigan. He says that Americans think nothing about walking down a public street talking on their cell phones, no matter how annoying that behavior might be to others. “That’s inconceivable in Eastern cultures,” he says. He was reminded of this on a recent trip back to Japan. While he was waiting for a flight home, he went into the lounge for Northwest Airlines (as it then was known) and pulled out his cell phone to make a call. “People got very upset,” he recalls.
A survey conducted by the Association of Japanese Private Railways, and translated by Reuters, provides more evidence.{39} The 2009 findings, which drew from 4,200 survey respondents, indicated that the top four annoyances on trains were:
1. Noisy conversation, horsing around
2. Music from headphones
3. The way passengers sit [particularly, if you take up more than your fair share of space]
4. Cellphone ringtones and talking on phone.
Perhaps the most foreign top annoyance was number 6: “applying make-up.” All of these behaviors draw attention to the person or do not perpetuate the common good. In Japan, separating yourself from the pack is annoying. In America, it’s a virtue. Kitayama says that people in a collectivist culture learn early on that fitting in is an important life skill. He says that there are data showing that Asian teenagers tend on average to be less annoyed with their parents, because their parents are part of their concept of self. So, being annoyed with one’s parents is tantamount to being annoyed with oneself.
There is experimental evidence for this notion that various cultures have different self-identities. For example, in one study, researchers showed subjects a group of five cartoon characters in a row, but one of the characters was clearly in the foreground, the others slightly behind. The characters all had expressive faces, and it was easy to infer their emotional states. The participants in the experiment were supposed to judge the mood of the person in the foreground.
For Americans, all of their attention was on the foreground character. You could see that in the way their eyes moved as they took in the scene. Their gaze was fixed on the foreground character, with scarcely a glance at those on either side. They judged the mood of the foreground character without referring to the others in the picture.
When the same picture was shown to experimental subjects from a more collectivist culture, their eye movements revealed a different pattern. Their eyes flitted around, taking in the entire scene. They judged the scene from a holistic perspective. If the people in the background were sad or frowning, then the smiling figure in the center was rated less happy than an American would rate that figure. If the people in the background were smiling, the mood of the central character was judged to be even more positive than if the background expressions were neutral.
Phoebe Ellsworth is a psychology professor at the University of Washington. She has conducted a number of experiments along these basic lines. She says that the difference reflects the way the Japanese are brought up and how they create their sense of self. They have a hard time detaching the individual from the group, something that Americans do without a second thought.
If something good happens to an American, chances are that person will simply feel good about it. If the same good thing happens to people from a collectivist culture, Ellsworth says, the individuals are likely to feel that it’s not going to last or that their friends are going to envy them for their success, so they have to guard against being boastful. “Americans cannot stretch their minds to think that anything negative could occur in a happy situation,” says Ellsworth.
The Japanese emotion called amae is another example of cultures shaping annoyance. “It’s a state of happy dependence,” says Ellsworth. The closest parallel in Western culture is in the relationship between mother and child. The child can pester the mother and disturb her when she’s working, and when the mother doesn’t get annoyed, we feel good because it shows what a close relationship it is. In Japan, this tolerance is not limited to a child’s behavior. It can include circumstances involving adults, in which one person can break a few social rules, understanding that the other person will tolerate it because they have such a close relationship. “We did a study where people asked for favors,” says Ellsworth. “Japanese subjects who participated in the study were much more willing to tolerate an inappropriate request for a favor from somebody and even to see that as a good thing.”