
…ade in China have caused me to question whether this is the best, or only, way to relate to people. They tend to say less and do more, showing their care through considerate actions instead of words. The wall between strangers is higher, perhaps, but once you’ve crossed that wall, everything is shared.
Unconscious imitation of belief systems is not a particular trait of Americans. In fact, Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, argues that humans are uniquely talented at mimicking the actions and ideas of others. Our brains naturally compel us to adopt the commonly held ideas of our communities. This impulse means that we unknowingly can develop “norms, institutions, and languages” which “emerge gradually without anyone fully apprehending how or why they work.”