Before we get into the topic of the week, I have want to share a resource with you that relates to last week’s blog post on smiles in different cultures. If you want to learn more about that topic, please have a look at Cross-Cultural Implications of Smiling.
And now this week’s topic:
In the 1980s companies like Siemens in German started to realize that they could expand their markets to many countries around the world, but they needed to be able to communicate with the people in those countries.And so they began to conduct in-house language training. But they were sometimes quite surprised that their best language students sometimes faltered when they went to the field and had to use their newly-learned language.
They began to realize that there is an aspect of communication that goes beyond the basic of language — and that is culture, which became the next challenge to train employees about.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky has devoted herself to understanding how differently people think and how that manifests itself in language — but also how language influences the way they think. There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
Boroditsky was born in Belarus. When she was 12 years old, her family immigrated to the United States, where she learned to speak English as her fourth language. As a teenager she began thinking about the degree to which language differences could shape an argument and exaggerate the differences between people. She received her B.A. degree in cognitive science at Northwestern University in 1996. She went to graduate school at Stanford University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2001. She worked under Gordon Bower who was her thesis adviser at Stanford where she also conducted research.
Watch her fascinating TED Talk here.