A summary of my writings on cross-cultural interactions

By Yi-Yang @ 2025-05-06T13:32 (+12)

I investigated aspects of cross-cultural interactions (CCIs) in the EA community, and wrote some of my findings here (in an order that I think makes sense to read in):

1. Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community

In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs’ perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:

  1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
  2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
  3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.

I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., personal anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community.

If you’re interested to read some vignettes shared by non-Western EAs, you can find them here and here.

2. Subtle Acts of Exclusion <> Microaggression and Internalised Racism

In this piece of writing, my aim is to help readers have a better understanding of MIR (which in my other writings I refer to as SAE), and to do that, I’ve listed down different types and examples of MIR. And given the fact that MIRs are easily misinterpreted, I’ve listed down some non-examples below too. 

3. Some low-confidence takes about cross-cultural interactions between Western EAs and non-Western EAs

It’s hard to know what is the right solution to combat the experiences and examples in the above writings. But for a select few, I have some higher-than-the-average-but-still-low-confidence takes on how to improve cross-cultural interactions.

Yarrow🔸 @ 2025-05-06T17:08 (+3)

I looked at every link in this post and the most useful one for me was this one where you list off examples of uncomfortable cross-cultural interactions from your interviewees. Especially seeing all the examples together rather than just one or two.

I’m a Westerner, but I’m LGBT and a feminist, so I’m familiar with analogous social phenomena. Instances of discrimination or prejudice often have a level of ambiguity. Was that person dismissive toward me because of my identity characteristics or are they just dismissive toward everyone… or were they in a bad mood…? You form a clearer picture when you add up multiple experiences, and especially experiences from multiple people. That’s when you start to see a pattern.

As a person in an identity group that is discriminated against, sometimes you can have a weird feeling that, statistically, you know discrimination is happening, but you don’t know for sure exactly which events are discrimination and which aren’t. Some instances of discrimination are more clear — such as someone invoking a trope or cliché about your group — but any individual instance of someone talking over you, disregarding your opinion, not taking an interest in you, not giving you time to speak, and so on, is theoretically consistent with someone being generally rude or disliking you personally. Stepping back and seeing the pattern is what makes all the difference.

This might be the most important thing that people who do not experience discrimination don’t understand. Some people think that people who experience discrimination are just overly sensitive or are overreacting or are seeing malicious intent where it doesn’t exist. Since so many individual examples of discrimination or potential discrimination can be explained away as someone being generally rude, or in a bad mood, or just not liking someone personally — or whatever — it is possible to deny that discrimination exists, or at least that it exists to the extent that people are claiming.

But discerning causality in the real world is not always so clean and simple and obvious — that’s why we need clinical trials for drugs, for example — and the world of human interaction is especially complex and subtle. 

You could look at any one example on the list you gave and try to explain it away. I got the sense that your interviewees shared this sense of ambiguity. For example: "L felt uncertain about what factors contributed to that dynamic, but they suspected the difference in culture may play a part." When you see all the examples collected together, from the experiences of several different people, it is much harder to explain it all away.