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

COMBATING ETHNOCENTRISM
representative red team. There is the obvious problem of security. Someone
fully able to represent the adversary culturally would very likely be unable to
obtain requisite clearances for participation in a classified red team exercise.
In fact, even if it were possible to find someone both culturally representative
and sympathetic to the goals of the red team, such as the participant born in
the region, the conflicts triggered by that sympathy, cultural identity, and cultural
allegiance could well lead to unforeseen cognitive biases that would be
difficult to counteract. 10
An alternative is to find an ethnic American citizen with similarities to the
people of the region of interest, but simply finding a US citizen with the same
ethnicity as those of the region of interest does not guarantee any special
insight into their thinking. Ethnicity is not the same as sharing culture or identity.
Not all ethnic groups in the US are isolated and self-perpetuating. Many,
in fact, put great effort into trying to assimilate into the larger “American culture”
by distancing themselves from their culture of origin. These people often
struggle with their own concept of cultural identity and the broader issues of
community affiliation. 11 Many immigrants and most first-generation offspring
have already begun the process of acculturation. More striking, their offspring
display a process of enculturation in the US by learning the language, attending
the schools, assimilating local and national values, and establishing ties to
a diverse community outside of their own ethnic enclave. In fact, the children
of recent immigrants share many of the same cognitive filters as those who are
generations removed from migration. That said, there are American citizens
born in the region of interest, like the member of the red team in which I participated,
who do have insight into specific cultures, principally because their
enculturation was affected by being born in, and living in, a foreign region.
The participant in that red team was a foreign-born American citizen, but
foreign birth is not a necessary condition for enculturation. 12 Living in a foreign
region, speaking the language, interacting with the people, developing
community ties, and establishing an identity within that community are all
part of the acculturation process and allow one to alter the cognitive filters
through which one interprets the world. Time spent on a US military base, in a
US embassy, or in a Western hotel overseas does not lead to acculturation.
10
Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America; John Lucy, Language Diversity
and Thought; Douglass Price-Williams, Explorations in Cross-Cultural Psychology; Marshall
Segall, Cross-Cultural Psychology; Richard Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures; Yali Zou and
Enrique Trueba, Ethnic Identity and Power; and Benjamin Whorf.
11
David Levinson and Melvin Ember, American Immigrant Cultures. For raw data covering 186
cultural groups since 1937, including immigrants, see the Human Relations Area Files at Yale
University.
12
Some anthropologists have argued that enculturation is specific to childhood but the evidence
supports that it is a lifelong process. See Segall.
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