Some Fashion in Okinawa....16+

Found some interesting fashion pictures on the internet,
apparently these were made in Okinawa during the summer.
That what at least is said on the web-page where you
could see rest of the pictures

Here is one of them....with some black cubes made by me)

Japanese Hell........................in the Subway

Have you ever been there...?


Click HERE to see the video
picture from here: click

Uncertainty Avoidance and Fundamental Attribution Error

A cultural measure of the degree to which people tolerate risk and unconventional behavior. Extent to which cultures socialize members to accept ambiguous situations and to tolerate uncertainty. Do we avoid risk? or we prefer to take it? On what do we base our decision making and reaction, how do we react to something we do not fully understand?

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations. In other words, people have an unjustified tendency to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind" of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces influencing the person. Overattribution is less likely, perhaps even inverted, when people explain their own behavior; this discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

The term was coined by Lee Ross (Ross, 1977)^[1] some years after a now-classic experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris (1967)^[2]. Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

Jones wrote that he found Ross's term "overly provocative and somewhat misleading", and also joked, "Furthermore, I'm angry that I didn't think of it first." More recently some psychologists, including Daniel Gilbert, have begun using the term "correspondence bias" for the fundamental attribution error (Gilbert & Malone, 1995^[3]; Gilbert, 1998^[4]).

Author Malcolm Gladwell provides a more soft-spoken definition of the fundamental attribution error: he defines it as extrapolation from a measured characteristic to an unrelated characteristic. He cites as an example "a typical study [that] showed that 'how neat a student's assignments were or how punctual he was told you almost nothing about how often he attended class or how neat his room or his personal appearance was'" (Gladwell, 2000, p.72)^[5]. By basing his definition on the comparison of one behavior with another behavior rather than one motivation with another motivation, Gladwell avoids the entanglements of complex questions about the "essence" of a person. - from here

The picture to the side shows how easy it is to make attribution errors. Judgments about why an event occurred or why someone behaved in a certain way are called attributions. When attributing something or someone, people often tend make mistakes. This is usually known as fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias. This error is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behavior is due to internal and dispositional factors and to disregard external or situational factors.

The picture above illustrates this error. The picture shows of a lady who is giving a man money because she thinks that he is homeless. In doing so, the lady is attributing his disposition to that the fact that he is out on the street and in shabby demeanor that he is homeless. However she is not considering other external factors that could have led him to be out on the streets. The fact that he is a home - a - phobic is something that the lady did not account for when assessing his situation .

Japanese Gothic Fasion...

Some more pics

Power Distance - Boss vs Subordinates

One of the concepts that we covered in the class was the Power Distance concept. It is a - "Theory of how a society deals with the fact that people are unequal in physical and intellectual capabilities. High power distance cultures are found in countries that let inequalities grow over time into inequalities of power and wealth. Low power distance cultures are found in societies that try to play down such inequalities as much as possible." source
We have discovered that depending on the type of the society the relationship between the boss and his subordinates changes. Moreover, it does relate to the collectivist versus individualistic societies, it seems that the more collectivist society is the bigger is the power distance. For instance Japan has a bigger power distance rather than US. This picture on the left could give you a good view on what is the power distance, what is power distance in your country/society?

Just a joke:

The polite way to pee

The teacher was talking to the class about manners.

‘Michael, if you were on a date having dinner with a nice young lady, how would you tell her that you have to go to the bathroom?’

Michael said, ‘Just a minute, I have to go pee.’

The teacher responded by saying, ‘That would be rude and impolite.’

‘What about you Sherman, how would you say it?’

Sherman said, ‘I am sorry, but I really need to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.’

‘That’s better, but it’s still not very nice to say the word bathroom at the dinner table.’

‘And you, little Eddie, can you use your brain for once and show us your good manners?’

‘I would say: Darling, may I please be excused for a moment? I have to shake hands with a very dear friend of mine, whom I hope to introduce you to after dinner.’

The teacher fainted….

Stole it from here

What is Culture?

In our class we had to ask ourselves what do we think culture is, it seems that it is an easy question. However, when you actually try to put all the different thoughts and ideas in your head about it into one definition that where you are stricken. There a lot of different interpretation of culture, and I believe for every human being culture does not mean the same as to some body else. It is something that we were thought and nurtured to accept and cultivate. We were given a task to imagine and draw a picture of culture, and show the differences in culture. Out group has decided to show one particular aspect of it, is how do people from different cultures greet each other. Therefore, we had drown a picture of man shaking hands, saluting each other and so on. However, I don't think that any of the groups had successfully shown all the culture aspects on their drawings. We got introduced to the model, where the culture is represented as an Iceberg, which is known that only 10% of the total body is shown on the surface, and the rest 90% is hidden.

In one of our first class sessions on Intercultural Business Communication in Japan by professor Garr Reynolds we had seen a video that has made an impression on the majority of class. After some research on this topic I have found uot that there are a lot of followers and parodies on this video. Here is one of them, which is done in Moscow. However, instead of filming different countries, they decided to do it on metropolitan stations :-)
Parody for "Where the Hell is Matt"