“What do we mean by culture? Well, typically when you think about culture, you mean differences between countries, differences between groups of interacting people. So people from Japan act differently than people from Germany, and people from Germany act and believe and behave differently than people from El Salvador. So think about just differences between countries. Now in order to, for there to be differences Between the people within a country or nation state or even a small group, there have to be similarities within. So it means that there have to be similar actions within a group. And that’s where the coordination game is gonna enter. And in addition, when we think about cultural behavior, we think of it being “interesting”. I mean, interesting sort of, [inaudible] what I mean is, is that it can be suboptimal in a way. It can be, if you sat down and efficiently said, what should these people be doing? Maybe what we’re doing doesn’t make sense. And that’ll be true of people from every nation or group. We say, look at the behavior and think, that seems different than how I would do it, or different than what seems maybe the most efficient way to do it. So by culture behavior, we’re gonna mean behavior as well that maybe doesn’t look optimal from an outsider’s perspective, but possibly viewed within that culture, it makes a lot of sense. ” – Transcript from Scott Page Coursera
Source:
Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course
