Steven Pinker

And then that's... Well, there's actually a twist on that.

So another relationship is hierarchy, alpha male, pecking order, top dog.

And the third one is transactional.

Now, where cultures differ is not across the board, but in what kind of relationships, parent-child, student-teacher, employee-boss, friend-friend, what resource...

money, favors, sex, and in what context?

Home, school, public.

If you mix and match those, that gives you kind of all the variation from Anthro 101.

And so there's certain resources.

So for example, there are cultures that really openly trade brides or daughters to become brides.

Ours doesn't

commoditize that explicitly, but we do, say, buy and sell land, which some cultures don't do, where the land might be communal.

And so if you think of all the resources, all the contexts, all the pairings... It's quite the matrix of how that can come together.

That's kind of the matrix of Anthro 101.

We often get misinterpretations when they're cross-cultural.

And that's part of what culture shock is.

You don't know what is the common knowledge in the new community that you have to deal with.

And that can result in... War.

It could result in war.

I mean, it can result in misunderstanding, sometimes comical ones, and it's used in comedy, as in Coming to America, as in Borat.

where you have the bumpkin from one culture using the assumptions that were native to that guy's culture but completely inappropriate, sometimes leading to embarrassment, sometimes to shock and outrage.