suggested answers ex2

Behavior	Value	Sample Countries/Areas
1- Use of understatement	H- Indirectness	China/Thailand
2- Asking people to call you by your first name	F- Informality	Australia/UnitedStates
3- Taking off from work to attend the funeral of an aunt	B- Centrality of family	Venezuela/Korea
4- Not helping the person next to you on an exam	I- Self-reliance	Switzerland/Canada
5- Disagreeing openly with someone at a meeting	A- Directness	Germany/England
6- Not laying off an older worker whose performance is weak	E- Respect for age	Japan/Pakistan
7- At a meeting, agreeing with a suggestion you think is wrong	D- Saving face	Asia generally
8- Inviting the teaboy to eat lunch with you in your office	J- Egalitarianism	Cambodia/Vietnam
9- Asking the headmaster’s opinion about something you’re an expert on	G- Deference to authority	India/Brazil
10- Accepting, without question, that something can’t be changed	C- External Control	Saudi Arabia/Turkey

As you can see, values are inextricably linked to behaviors. They tend to reinforce one another. Although we have given you only one example of the kind of behaviors that might be a result of acting on the basis of a value, thousands of behaviors you might witness everyday abroad and at home can be traced back to a few core values.

For example, Directness as a value may be easily seen in US-American society in the candid and blunt way people often speak to one another, “telling it like it is,” or in the way the educational system rewards speaking out and volunteering answers in the classroom. In much of Asia, it is Indirectness which is valued and can be seen in how people are often much more circumspect and reserved in academic settings and everyday social interaction, even using third-parties to make requests of or smooth over a problem between friends.

Being able to identify and understand the values which lie behind people’s actions is an important starting point in learning both how to adapt behaviorally to a new cultural context and in connecting these behaviors to the motivations behind the "rules and regulations" of a society.

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