Culture is a set of defaults

How loud is a disagreement allowed to get before it is rude. Is fifteen minutes late an insult or a rounding error. When an adult asks whether you would like to do something, is that a question. Is a compliment about your work meant literally or is it the opening of a negotiation. How much do you say about a family situation before it becomes oversharing.

I went to secondary school in Dubai between 2006 and 2010, at an international school. The relevant fact about that kind of institution is not that it is international in the brochure sense. It is that being from somewhere else was the ordinary condition rather than the exception, so nothing in the air supplied an answer to a very large number of small questions like those.

In a place with a settled majority, none of those are questions. They have answers, the answers are not written anywhere, and nobody who holds them experiences them as answers at all. They experience them as how things are.

The word that fits

What that environment gave me, and it took a long time to notice I had it, is a sense that culture behaves like a set of defaults.

Not identity, not essence, not values in the way the word gets used on a careers page. Defaults, in the ordinary technical sense: the value a system uses when nobody has specified one. You need an answer to how late is late, and if nobody supplies one, something supplies one anyway, and it feels like a fact.

The useful consequence of that framing is that it explains the asymmetry perfectly. A default is invisible to whoever shares it and glaring to whoever does not. This is why culture is only ever visible from outside it, and why asking a settled majority to describe their own culture produces either a list of foods or an embarrassed silence.

It also predicts the shape of most friction I have seen at work. Two people with different defaults for the same unspecified question, both of whom believe they are simply behaving normally and are watching somebody else behave strangely.

The failure the framing has

Here is the part I got wrong for a decade, and it is a serious one.

Defaults sound overridable. That is the whole connotation of the word. You can set a different value. And so the framing quietly encourages you to treat other people’s norms as configuration, negotiable, a preference somebody could just as well change once it has been pointed out to them.

Some of them are not. Some of the things that present as a default are load-bearing for a person’s sense of who they are, and the fact that it is not written down does not make it shallow. Approaching one of those as a settings problem, reasonably, in good faith, with a clear explanation of why the other value would work better, is a very efficient way to be badly insulting while believing you are being generous.

I have done that. More than once, and not always with strangers.

There is also a quieter problem with the framing, which is that it flatters the person doing the framing. If culture is configuration, then the person with the fewest firmly held defaults is the most adaptable, the most reasonable, the easiest to work with. That is one reading. The other reading is that they have fewer commitments, and are describing an absence as a skill. I am not sure which of those I am, and I notice I have never wanted to look at it very hard.

The defaults I actually hold are the ones I cannot name. I only find out about them when somebody violates one, and the tell is not an argument. It is that I am briefly and disproportionately annoyed about something small, and then have to work backwards from the annoyance to whatever rule I did not know I was enforcing.