faith – Success Across Cultures

How does our locus of control affect our daily lives?

Let’s let our good friends, Ann and Kamal, illustrate the differences.

Ann is of a culture with an internal locus of control – she believes her actions will see results. Control is in her hands.

Kamal is of a culture with an external locus of control – he believes that the environment or a higher power is the director of life. He is powerless to his fate.

What happens when the two worlds collide?

Locus of Control in Healthcare

Kamal is in pain and is prescribed medication by a doctor. Knowing his situation, Kamal’s close friend Ann follows up on his health.

Herein lies the difference between those from an internal-locus culture and an external-locus culture.

The internal-locus, Ann, believes that taking action and following up with a professional and with additional medication will determine the outcome of Kamal’s health issue.

The external-locus, Kamal, arrives at a point in his health where he believes his fate is predestined, and this pain is a part of it. He accepts his painful fate.

Locus of Control in Media

When you look at Western media, you can clearly see the internal locus of control prevalent in everything from self-help manuals to life coaches and therapists.

Glance at any magazine headline or scroll through a Western website, and you’ll see the “top ten ways” in which to improve yourself in one way or another – whether the improvement targets your health, appearance, or habits.

These basic media elements indicate that individual improvement is in one’s own hands. And this internal locus is prevalent in Western values and norms, which highlight independence, self-determination, and individualism.

Godly Values & Norms

When you take a look at a culture’s values and norms, these often prove to be a more direct indicator of that culture’s locus.

For instance, those with an external locus of control – Muslim cultures, for instance – live according to the ideology that life was created for them.

Such a view manifests in the culture’s fundamental traditions and strict rules of law, all of which have been bestowed upon them by God. God directs the course of both individual lives and of all of humanity.

These are the values and norms that drive the external locus of control in such cultures.

Yet, there are some individuals in external locus cultures who possess an internal locus.

Muslim clerics, for example, are considered the vehicles of God’s word, so they instruct their fellow man by directing community and political views.

They, however, attribute this control to God and, in doing so, God is still the eternal director of mankind.

Next week, we’ll talk about how the four building blocks of culture are influenced by ethnocentricity.

Imagine you’re in the Amazonian jungle.

You’re with a tour group, camera in hand, thrilled to spot a colorful exotic bird or a dragon in antiquity. You’ve got your finger on your camera’s shutter button as if it were the pulse of culture.

And that’s when you see culture in all its natural glory:

A woman standing, alone, extracting the fruit of nuts from a palm tree, cracking them open with ease.

When she turns, she is shocked to see a tourist group descending upon her. You and the crowd surround her, not asking for permission to take her photograph. Simply click-click-clicking away, capturing culture on camera.

The woman drops the nut on the jungle floor and appears to be having a panic attack. In complete shock, she cannot breathe. She breaks down. She works herself up into such a state that she has to be taken to the hospital.

The episode leaves you and your fellow tourists wondering, “What frightened her so?”

Range of Beliefs

Beliefs are often interconnected with values and rituals, which is why all three are grouped together in the 10 Cultural Universals.

Cultural beliefs range from seemingly trivial superstitions to more significant and impactful convictions.

Let’s take, for instance, the Chinese belief that the number, 4, is bad luck. This superstitious belief is rooted in the language of Mandarin – “4” (四, SÌ) sounds like “death” (死, sǐ) in Chinese.

This is why you won’t find a 4th floor button on a Chinese elevator. A superstition, seemingly trivial to others, but it does affect building construction throughout China.

More impactful beliefs – such as beliefs about gender roles, healthcare, education, etc. – are much more involved.

For instance, religious faith and belief sometimes holds unexplainable healing powers, which the believers site as miracles. In some cases, the health of patients who are provided a placebo improves with no explanation.

What heals them? Is it belief? The Holy Spirit?

As Eric Vance writes in Unlocking the Healing Power of You:

“Scientists have known about the placebo effect for decades and have used it as a control in drug trials. Now they are seeing placebos as a window into the neurochemical mechanisms that connect the mind with the body, belief with experience.”

Beliefs can also have far-reaching consequences, if ill-informed.

For instance, sometimes cultural beliefs interfere with health-seeking behavior.

According to an article published in the African Journal of Disability:

“In a study on the abuse of disabled children in Ghana, the cultural belief that disabled children were cursed, led to such severe stigmatization that children were often hidden away by their parents, or left at a river to die.”

Cultural beliefs are often innocuous, but they can sometimes be harmful. As they were in the case of the Amazonian woman.

All-Powerful Beliefs

The scenario detailed in the intro actually happened to Michael J. Balick, PhD, Director of the Institute of Economic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden when he visited Brazil.

In his own words, Dr. Balick explained what had so frightened the woman:

“She was convinced that the people had stolen her spirit. And it was the belief, not the clicking cameras, that caused the physical reaction.”

What we believe at our core is so deep-seated that just such an ambush of our beliefs can make us physically ill.

This is one reason why understanding another’s cultural beliefs will make you more sensitive to how they walk through the world. You can then apply this understanding to alter behaviors that, in another culture, might be considered harmful.

Tag: faith

How Media and Faith Contribute to a Culture’s Locus of Control

10 Cultural Universals: Beliefs