Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

CHAPTER SIX
Quite the contrary, each of these is a “virtual” America, an approximation of
life in the United States on some foreign soil, and it is the time spent away
from these institutions that is important.
The red team experience reinforced lessons I learned from my own analytic
failures and biases. Watching the struggle between the man enculturated in the
region of interest and the academic experts was a frustrating experience. It
was clear that the experts would not, or could not, hear what he was saying
and that neither he nor I knew how to get the other experts to listen. I doubt
this communication failure was the result of stubbornness or arrogance on
anyone’s part. It seemed rather that the experts’ thinking naturally defaulted to
their own cultural reference points, which interfered with his attempts to communicate
his cultural knowledge.
Specific cultural knowledge is a skill and the foundation for forecasting the
behavior and decisionmaking of foreign actors. Acquiring cultural knowledge
should be taken as seriously as learning any other facet of one’s analytic capabilities.
Moreover, it is incumbent on analysts to educate their own leadership
and policymakers about the value and utility of cultural knowledge for intelligence
analysis.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Ethnocentrism is a normal condition, and it results in analytic bias. The analytic
community and intelligence researchers need to develop tools and techniques
to combat analytic ethnocentrism. I believe that using cultural diversity
as a strategy to combat ethnocentrism has much to recommend it. 13
Security concerns may make it very difficult, if not impossible, to hire people
who are genuinely representative of a given culture. As an alternative to
focusing on hiring practices, I recommend a formal cultural training program
to facilitate acculturation. The program would include language acquisition
and a classroom segment centered on specific cultures, but it would go beyond
these by having the students go to countries of interest and interact with the
13
Some social action groups have appropriated the words “cultural diversity” from Levi-Strauss
and the French school of structural anthropology as a rallying cry to advance an agenda of equal
access to resources and power. That is, the concept has been politicized, and, invoking the words
“cultural diversity” in a public forum ensures that people will have some emotional reaction. This
is not my intention. The use of the words in this work is meant strictly in the technical sense, specifically,
that is, to refer to individuals whose enculturation occurs among different cultures or
individuals who have experienced acculturation. Acculturation is not specific to any one group,
all people can and do experience acculturation to one degree or another through cultural contact
and cultural diffusion, defined as the spreading of a cultural trait (e.g., material object, idea, or
behavior pattern) from one society to another without wholesale dislocation or migration. Moreover,
acculturation can be accomplished purposefully through training and fieldwork.
84