I recently read this part in Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture

Operational implications of culture lie in the fact that cultures act as default decision systems. For example, if you do not decide explicitly what kind of parent you want to be, the culture makes this decision for you. When people repeatedly use default values, they tend to forget that they have a choice. Instead, they treat such values as “realities out there,” undermining the fact that those “realities” will remain “out there” as long as no one is willing to challenge them. The problem is that the implicitness of the underlying assumptions prevents actors from questioning their validity; therefore, the defaults usually remain unchallenged and become obsolete.

It is such an interesting concept. For anything in life, if you don’t have a personal and explicit reaction, your reaction defaults to your culture. 

Here is a picture that summarizes a study that is explained in The Culture Map. They have checked different countries on different behaviors. 

Let’s say giving negative feedback. People in Japan are more prone to give indirect negative feedback while on the other extreme are people from Russia who give direct negative feedback.

Let’s say you take confrontation. People in Japan don’t want to confront people while in the other end people in France are more confrontational. 

This is not only for the things that are mentioned in the picture but for everything else. Hobbies, sports, job, family. 

What is the importance of sports, which sport is more important to you? What hobbies do you have? How much time do you spend on your hobbies? And it goes on and on.