Yeah coming from a culture where you were taught not to make eye contact and then going to a country where it’s rude to not look someone in the eye was very jarring.
I still have to basically look at someone’s temple to get by, even a decade later. The discomfort of making eye contact is just so ingrained now.
Yeah this is a common issue for people who move across cultures.
I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.
He had 2 of these people end up in hospital and a formal accusation of bullying against him... my conclusion was, he'd narrowed on a culture that is averse to social challenge / conflict. Where saying "no" would be socially unacceptable.
But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
Yeah unfortunately I see that a ton as an Indian myself , where we’ve been taught to be submissive.
Many of my other Indian coworkers are always too scared to push back in any form, and many of my Indian friends back in India would work till the early hours of the morning regularly.
I’m lucky in the sense that I know to push back often when something doesn’t feel right or is illogical to me. Ironically I was often chided in high school for that as teachers would suggest that this would be bad for my career. It’s actually been the best thing for it, letting me become system architects at multiple large companies. But I see where they were coming from, in that the same attitude would have burned me if I’d stayed.
> I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.
> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
He was fully aware of the "flip-side." He explicitly admitted he's hiring people solely with a cultural predisposition towards "never saying no." He can ask anything of them knowing it's impossible for them to refuse, even if it kills them.
> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
You assume he cares. Assuming the person across from you gives a crap about you is a regularly fatal one.
Humans are not basically good. They are basically greedy.
Most humans are both good (empathy is a strong thing) and greedy (wanting what's best for yourself and those are you close to is also a strong incentive). Balancing those two, sometimes opposing, desires is part of being human.
It's worth noting that they're not always opposing. Sometimes empathy makes us feel better when others feel good, and the negative impact on ourselves can be more than countered by the good feeling from making others happier.
Most humans are basically good. A significant minority aren't, maybe about 10%. Enough that you should never ignore the possibility the other person is a psycho, but few enough that you should never assume everybody else is a psycho.
Also, psychos tend to concentrate in certain places. If you're in a board room, or hanging out with a bunch of surgeons, perhaps it's rational to assume everybody else there is a psycho.
It's interesting that millions of people will probably read stuff about "eye contact = trust/attention", when in fact this is a complex topic.
Reminds me of the pseudoscience on how "touching your face or nose is a sign of deceit". Turns out almost everyone is no better than chance at spotting deceit. But judges, cops, school teachers etc... have all been relying on this kind rule to change the course of other people's lives.
Thanks for posting this, I was brought up the same way. It's very uncomfortable for me to have eye contact in a conversation, I usually just do it when greeting people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_contact#Cultural_differenc...