Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Response of chapter 1 by KU


In chapter 1, it introduced that the objective of the book. Around the globe, the thinking, feeling and acting of people are all different. And the author is looking for ways to help dealing with it. First of all, he explained why people are different. I like the analogy of culture as mental programming. “Human nature is what all human beings have in common. It is the operating system that determines our physical and basic psychological functioning.” “The personality of an individual is his or her unique personal set of mental programs that needn’t be shared with any other human being” Quoted from page 6 and 7. Culture is learnt. Although living in a same group (culture background), people will still develop their personalities.

He mentioned a problem in very common way to carry out a research- that is questionnaire. It is extremely difficult to design a test that fit everyone in globe. Such as there are no intelligence tests that are culture free. Because of the difference in the social environment, the test could reflect only the innate abilities of the people. The ways people do questionnaires also make different results. In my past experience, all questionnaires ask for degree for agreements (extremely agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and extremely disagree) don’t work for me. Since I never pick up the first and the last one, the score I got from each question is within the range 2 to 4. Therefore, I can always get a medium score after finishing the questionnaire. The author also mentioned that there is high probability that people would act in another way than answering the questions. Chapter 1 leaves many questions to me and I believe I can figure them out in the following chapters.

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