Cultural Interview Lessons From the Road

Republished with permission from WZ By Chris Norris, CFI The WZ Non-Confrontational Interview method has been a part of my career for over 28 years now, and I’m happy to say that I’ve been working for WZ for 19 years. Through the years much has changed for both myself and WZ. One of the biggest…

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Universal Laughter and Deception

Is laughter recognized in the same way across cultures? And, if so, can we tell if people in different cultures are faking their laughter? This is exactly what a team of researchers attempted to answer in a recent publication in Psychological Science. An astoundingly large group of 31 researchers sought to analyze reactions to laughter…

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Reading Hairstyles?

We focus a lot on reading people’s nonverbal behavior, but is there something to be read into about our hairstyles also? This is precisely what Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang argue in a recent paper. Essentially, while past research has argued that emotional expressions can reveal one’s culture, they argue that differing hairstyles,…

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Embracing Nuances Across Cultures

It is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone from a given culture thinks similarly. Psychologists have been doing it for years! Last month, we blogged about Drs. Takano and Osaka’s research challenging the “common sense” idea that Japanese are invariably and typically collectivist in their thinking, while Americans are individualists.…

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