Two cultural anthropologists, James Bradley and Mark Phillips, did an interesting study about the difficulties people experience when they travel across cultural boundaries. This study was done back in the early 1970's, the researchers wanted to know how the expectations that people had before they traveled abroad compared with their experiences to people who'd never left the United Sates. They were particularly concerned with long term stays of at least a year and up to several years. So first they interviewed college students who had never traveled abroad. Then for their group who had experienced extended stays elsewhere in the world, they interviewed returning Peace Corps workers, who had spend a considerable amount of time abroad, usually living with, and helping out people who are part of the underdeveloped or developing world. For added insight, they also interviewed Chinese students living and studying in the United States. Their method was to first draw up a long list of the kinds of things that might be different when one travels abroad. They came up with 33 items in total as a reasonable sample of the kind of things that differ across cultural boundaries. I stress that this is only a very small sample it includes items like the type of food eaten, the type of colors worn, the amount of privacy I would have and so forth. For the students who had never traveled abroad, they developed a scale in which the type of fooding was assigned at arbitrary value of 500. The students were asked to evaluate each of the other items on the list, giving a proportionally greater or lesser value to the item based on how difficult they expected their adjustment to the cultural differences to be. So, if they thought for example that the amount of privacy they would have would be twice as difficult for them to adjust to, they would give it a value of 1,000. If they thought it would be half as difficult, they would give it a value of 250. They asked the returning peace corps workers and Chinese students to do the same assessment, but in their case based on how much adjustment each of the items had actually required. They then ranked the items in terms of difficulty adjustment from 1 to 33. This is what they found on the chart you see on the screen. In some cases, the expectations corresponded to the reality experienced by the Peace Corps workers. In others, however, there were major discrepancies. I want to call your attention to just a couple of these discrepancies that are especially revealing about culture. The general pace of life and how punctual most people are. The individuals who had not traveled abroad had ranked these very low on the list, 30th and 32nd respectively out of 33. So right near the very bottom. For the returning peace corp veterans however, these are two of the most difficult things to adjust to. They rank them as you can see respectively second, and third, and I want to stress again, what we’re talking about here. The general pace of life and how punctual most people are. Why would these be so difficult for Americans to adjust to? What this reasearch is telling us is that it is very often the little cultural differences that are the most difficult to adjust to. I'll go into this further in our next video. Because in the business world such little matters can often have a big impact on how successful teams are. And accomplishing their goals.