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Greece: Up Yours—twice!

Widespread: I'm telling the truth

What did you score?

Over 30 points: You are a well-traveled, well-rounded, broad-thinking person who gets on well with everyone regardless of where they are from. People love you.

15-30 points: You have a basic awareness that others behave differently from you and, with dedicated practice, you can improve the understanding you currently have.

15 points or less: You think everyone thinks like you do. You should never be issued a passport or even be allowed out of the house. You have little concept that the rest of the world is different from you and you think that it's always the same time and season all over the world. You are probably an American.

Why We're All Becoming American

Due to the wide distribution of American television and movies, the younger generations of all cultures are developing a generic form of North American body language. For example, Australians in their sixties will identify the British Two-Fingers-Up gesture as an insult, whereas an Australian teenager is more likely to read it as the number two and will recognize the American Middle-Finger-Raised as a main form of insult. Most countries now recognize the Ring gesture as meaning “OK,” even if it's not traditionally used locally. Young children in every country that has television now wear baseball caps backward and shout “Hasta la vista, baby,” even if they don't understand Spanish.

American television is the prime reason cultural

body-language differences are disappearing.

The word “toilet” is also slowly disappearing from the English language because North Americans, who are rugged pioneers and log splitters, are terrified to say it. North Americans will ask for the “bathroom,” which, in many parts of Europe, contains a bath. Or they ask for a “restroom” and are taken to where there are lounge seats to relax. In England, a “powder room” contains a mirror and washbasin, a “little girls' room” is found in a kindergarten, and “comfort stations” are positioned on the motorways of Europe. And a North American who asks to “wash up” is likely to be gleefully led to the kitchen, given a tea towel, and invited to wash the dishes.

Cultural Basics Are the Same Almost Everywhere

As discussed in Chapter 3, facial expressions and smiles register the same meanings to people almost everywhere. Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco, showed photographs of the emotions of happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise to people in twenty-one different cultures and found that in every case, the majority in each country agreed about the pictures that showed happiness, sadness, and disgust. There was agreement by the majority in twenty out of the twenty-one countries for the surprise expressions; for fear, only nineteen out of twenty-one agreed; and for anger, eighteen out of twenty-one agreed. The only significant cultural difference was with the Japanese, who described the fear photograph as surprise.

Ekman also went to New Guinea to study the South Fore culture and the Dani people of West Irian who had been isolated from the rest of the world. He recorded the same results, the exception being that, like the Japanese, these cultures could not distinguish fear from surprise.

He filmed these stone-age people enacting these same expressions and then showed them to Americans, who correctly identified them all, proving that the meanings of smiling and facial expressions are universal.

The fact that expressions are inborn in humans was also demonstrated by Dr. Linda Camras from DePaul University in Chicago. She measured Japanese and American infants' facial responses using the Facial Action Coding System (Oster &c Rosenstein, 1991). This system allowed researchers to record, separate, and catalog infant facial expressions and they found that both Japanese and American infants displayed exactly the same emotional expressions.

So far in this book we have concentrated on body language that is generally common to most parts of