Annoying

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.”

Here is the kind of scenario that researchers used to study amae. They asked subjects whether they would be annoyed by a neighbor who asked them to water his plants while he was away. Most people said that wouldn’t be annoying. Then, however, they asked the subjects what if the trip were for a week, would that be annoying? What about a month? Six months? A year? “The Americans got annoyed much sooner,” says Ellsworth. “They would see this as an inappropriate trespass on their goodwill at maybe one week. The Japanese would eventually see it as too much of an imposition, but the favor would have to be much bigger before they got to that point. We value independence, and we have contempt for people who seem too dependent.”

Yet if Americans get annoyed with the Japanese for seeming to be self-effacing and unreasonably tolerant, the flip side of that helps explain why other cultures are irritated by Americans. “What annoys people about Americans is that we have these big cheesy smiles on our faces all of the time, for no apparent reason whatsoever,” says Stanford University’s Hazel Markus. “For an American, a smile says, ‘I’m okay, I’m a good person, I’m in control, and I’m worth knowing.’ Everybody else thinks, ‘What’s the matter with this person? Is this person insane? Why do they have this smile on? They don’t know me, why are they smiling at me?’” In other words, the smile is annoying. “They think it’s fake, and along with that, what they find really annoying is that Americans act like they’re your best friend after five minutes.”

If you go to Amazon.com, you can purchase three DVDs of the movie Avatar for $59.97. If you go to a Web site that specializes in merchandise from China, you can buy a hundred copies of that film for $140. The U.S. government has waged a legal war by means of the World Trade Organization to crack down on this practice, but psychologists say that even if they win the legal war, they may be fighting a cultural difference that will be hard to overcome. Michael Ross of the University of Waterloo and Qi Wang from Cornell University have looked into how a culture’s history shapes its present attitudes.^{40} They point to research that demonstrates the Chinese tendency to accept ancient wisdom as valid. By contrast, Western tradition encourages authors to “question, alter, and reject earlier ideas and theories.”

Think of Westerners’ concept of plagiarism. “Western plagiarizers typically claim lack of intent and apologize, resign, or pay damages. In China, such ‘borrowing’ of past work does not engender the same level of social disapproval,” Ross and Wang wrote. “The East Asian emphasis on the interconnectedness of selves implies that what is yours is also mine. I don’t have to apologize for appropriating your words and thoughts as if they were my own. Indeed, my use of your words demonstrates my admiration for you. In the West, with its clear demarcation between mine and yours, similar actions seem more akin to theft than admiration.” At least legally, China has started to move away from this attitude by beginning to accept international norms about copyrighted material, but this psychological point of view helps explain why the change has been infuriatingly slow to Western publishers.

Historical attitudes aren’t the only thing that raises barriers and creates cross-cultural annoyances. Another problem occurs when dissimilar cultures have different perceptions of time.

Consider this example. Today, Neil Altman is a psychotherapist in New York City. As a young man, Altman went to India as a Peace Corps volunteer, where he helped implement some new agricultural practices. Every so often, he had the occasion to visit the local horticulture office to get seeds and the like. The seeds were dispensed by the man who ran the office, Mr. Kahn, so Altman’s first stop was at Mr. Kahn’s desk. Inevitably, there would be