Our Cultural Goggles

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"The survival of mankind will depend to a large extent on the ability of people who think differently to act together." - Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (1980)

We each see the world through a set of cultural goggles - what historian Kenneth Lipartito describes as "a system of values, ideas, and beliefs which constitute a mental apparatus for grasping reality". In other words, our mental operating system: the software of the mind. Each person's goggles are uniquely their own, and we're often blind to the fact that we and everyone around us are wearing them.

Your author has never seen her goggles...But if you put me on the spot and demanded I describe them, then I'd guess that mine are about 1/3 British 🇬🇧 culture, 1/3 Austrian 🇦🇹 and European 🇪🇺 cultural values, and 1/3 other influences in my life (the US 🇺🇸, the Catholic church ⛪, the software industry 👩‍💻, hacking/infosec 🥷, and some more I'm probably not even aware of). Of course, we could dig even deeper into what my goggles are made of: which parts of British or Austrian culture am I really referring to? But this is at least a starting point: realizing that I am wearing my own set of cultural goggles, and they color my world so much that I might completely overlook the concerns of people using the products I build.

Ask yourself:

  • What does the world look like through my users' goggles?
  • What scares them?
  • What information do they want to keep private?
  • Which privacy harms might I expose them to if I design products assuming their life works just like mine?

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory

Now, a full analysis of the world's cultures is clearly beyond the scope of this course - that's the subject of multiple research fields! Nothing we cover here will be able to capture all the nuances of culture. But wouldn't it be helpful to have some broad framework for orientation when we think about cultural differences? Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions theory is exactly that. Built as part of Hofstede's study of employee values worldwide at IBM from 1967-1973, it's since been extended into a model that compares national cultures across six different dimensions. The descriptions quoted here are adapted from Hofstede's website, where you can learn more about the framework.


The extent to which people feel independent, as opposed to being interdependent as members of larger wholes.

The extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.

Masculinity describes the extent to which the use of force is endorsed socially. In a feminine society, the genders are emotionally closer. Competing is not so openly endorsed, and there is sympathy for the underdog. This is not about individuals, but about expected societal gender roles.

A society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. It has nothing to do with risk avoidance, nor with following rules. It has to do with anxiety and distrust in the face of the unknown, and conversely, with a wish to have fixed habits and rituals, and to know the truth.

In a long-term-oriented culture, the basic notion about the world is that it is in flux, and preparing for the future is always needed. In a short-term-oriented culture, the world is essentially as it was created, so that the past provides a moral compass, and adhering to it is morally good.

In an indulgent culture it is good to be free. Doing what your impulses want you to do is good. Friends are important and life makes sense. In a restrained culture, the feeling is that life is hard, and duty, not freedom, is the normal state of being.


💻 Exercise: examine how countries in each region of the world differ on each cultural dimension on Hofstede's Globe. (You can also try using the Hofstede Insights country comparison tool.) Pick two countries where your software is used - ideally, countries that are quite different from your own background. Consider: how might the differences you see in each dimension affect the way users there use your product? What social norms are important to them? How have these norms influenced their country's laws: are some things illegal there that people do freely in your country? Whom do they feel a sense of duty to? What might they find desperately embarrassing that wouldn't bother you much at all - or vice versa?


Context Matters for Software

💻 Reading Assignment: Signal is for everyone, and everyone is different - Nina, Signal Blog

The tech industry–its products, conceptual frameworks, linguistic conventions, and cultural norms–is largely centered in the US (and, increasingly, China. But we’re focused here on the US, where Signal is based)...This has resulted in a too-familiar pattern, where tech companies based in the US make assumptions and decisions grounded in the instincts, perspectives, and relatively narrow experiences of US-based engineers, designers, and product managers. This isn’t because the people at these companies are necessarily trying to project their view onto others. But we all are shaped by our context, and in the worst case, these assumptions are exported as though one size fits all...

...One of the key issues that we face in attempting to build an app that works for people in very different conditions is how varied tech infrastructure is in different parts of the world, from bandwidth speeds, to mobile devices and operating systems, to data plans and the cost of calling...Audio is transmitted during Signal voice and video calls using constant bitrate (CBR) encoding instead of the variable bitrate (VBR) encoding schemes that are widely used in other apps. Using CBR requires a little bit more bandwidth, but this choice is an important security measure that helps protect Signal calls from novel attacks against VBR that could otherwise have a negative impact on call privacy. We are also researching new privacy-preserving techniques for audio calls in order to have fewer dropped calls even in shakier network conditions...


This blog post was written in response to some Western users criticizing Signal's decision to implement stickers and stories in their app. Consider:

  • Do the examples in this blog post surprise you?
  • Have you made any tradeoffs between performance/consumption and privacy or security in products you've built, for example when trying to optimize for low bandwidth?
  • Were you aware of the cultural differences in what people consider "normal" for online messaging? Can you think of any other examples of this?

Cultural Differences in Privacy Expectations

Culture plays a huge role in shaping our expectations of privacy. There are significant differences in privacy attitudes even between the US and the nations of the EU, which you might think would be relatively similar as they are all WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). While this is still an active research area and many more user studies are needed to better understand the differences, Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory can help us out here: this study found that the dimensions (particularly individualism and indulgence) were more predictive of users' decisions about collection of their personal data than their country of residence or language.

We encourage you to check out all the Further Reading linked below on cultural differences. However, as a taster, here are some key insights from the first two resarch studies included:

  • Power distance may influence how tolerant people are when authorities violate their privacy. Similarly, people in individualistic cultures are more concerned about their personal privacy than those in collectivist cultures, as are people in more indulgent cultures (because they place greater value in having control over their personal lives).
  • There are also context-specific cultural differences. For example, one study found that users from individualist countries may be more comfortable sharing their location from a computer than from a mobile device, whereas the opposite is true for users in collectivist countries, so "organizations may need to tailor their data collection methods to different cultures in an effort to make users feel more comfortable"
  • Privacy explanations to users also need to be culturally-specific. Telling your users that third-party companies are accountable for the processing of personal data will make users in individualistic countries such as the US more likely to disclose, whereas it will be counterproductive in China.
  • Users in collectivistic cultures tend to be more sensitive to group privacy, so you should provide features for collaborative privacy management for users to communicate group privacy norms within their social circle(s).
  • When developing social media, consider whether your audience control features and recommendation algorithms are culturally biased. To name just a few examples, users from collectivist cultures expect to be able to enforce more restrictive information boundaries with their employers and work colleagues than those in individualist cultures, where in contrast people are more reluctant to share information with teachers (so they might be less comfortable with a teacher being in their friend recommendations, for example).

Further Reading