About 15 years ago, I attended a sociolinguistics event at the University of Toronto that consisted of several lectures. One in particular stayed with me. The lecturer talked about how cultural differences cause misinterpretations in communication, much like misinterpretations happen when two partly bilingual people attempt to communicate in good will but don’t fully understand each other, yet nod anyway for the sake of politeness.
How we use spoken language and body language is deeply tied to the cultural fabric we were raised in. When we travel, work, or live abroad, our communication style and behavioural norms come with us, and largely unexamined.
Few of us receive any meaningful preparation for the cultural expectations of the places we are entering, beyond the countries widely known for strict rules around dress, public conduct between men and women, gum chewing, or social hierarchies that govern who speaks and to whom. Most of us simply go, hope for the best, and improvise the rest.
The lecturer presented Geert Hofstede’s research. Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist who spent much of his career asking two seemingly simple questions:
Do people from different countries think, feel, and act differently in predictable ways? If so, can those differences be measured?
His answer, developed over decades of research, was Yes.
His most significant work began in the late 1960s, when he had access to a dataset that most social scientists could only dream of: attitude surveys from over 100,000 IBM employees across more than 50 countries.
Same company, same roles, same questions, with the only meaningful variable being where people were from. What emerged from that data was a framework of six cultural dimensions that became measurable axes along which societies consistently differ in their collective values, assumptions, and behaviours.
Hofstede was not the first to observe that culture governs behaviour, but he was among the first to map it onto a functional anthropological system. His framework remains one of the most widely used tools in cross-cultural research, international business, organizational psychology, human resources, and increasingly in fields where language and communication are at the centre of the work.
Understanding cultural differences is only half of the challenge. The other half is adaptation: the deliberate, informed adjustment of how we communicate, what we assume, how we behave, and what we leave room for, depending on who we are communicating with and where they come from.
When people from distant cultures come together, many communicate in a second language while still applying the communicative styles and behavioural norms from their homeland. Spoken language gets translated, while the cultural logic beneath it stays foreign and open to misinterpretation.
This phenomenon is not limited to human interactions. It also applies to content created for users in one culture and translated for users in distant cultures. Join me in exploring the concept of cultural distance and how it impacts cross-cultural understanding and interpretation.
How Culture Lives Inside a Conversation
Picture two people in a room, speaking English to each other. One is a consultant from the Netherlands, and the other is a senior manager from Japan. The consultant presents her recommendations directly, efficiently, and with clear conviction. The manager listens, nods at intervals, and says nothing that signals disagreement. The meeting ends. The consultant leaves thinking they are aligned. The manager leaves thinking the consultant was alarmingly presumptuous.
No one was rude. No one misheard a word. And yet something went wrong. Something that no dictionary and no translation tool would have caught.
The sensitivity to cultural distance was not checked.
The 6 Dimensions of National Culture
Think of these as tendencies rather than fixed truths.
I want to be clear here: none of these are tied in any way to religious differences, and were not designed to be. But they are tied to the political frameworks that influence a society’s behavioural norms. They are strictly behavioural patterns that emerged at the population level from data samples Hofstede worked with at the workplace level.
These indices are updated from time to time, hence the ranking of the listed countries changes. In cross-cultural studies, they help illuminate the invisible rules of engagement in human interaction and offer a way for individuals from anywhere in the world to have an insight into why a cultural mismatch may be happening, even when no one intended it.
The country examples used throughout this piece reflect Hofstede’s research and are presented here in that spirit. They are not a commentary on any country’s current politics, policies, or people.
Lastly, please do not reduce this model into a country-level personality profile despite how tempting it may be. Remember that this research is based on interactions of individual international people working within organizations that operate across many countries. It is not based on entire countries working together.
The idea here is to calibrate with individuals whenever an international interaction occurs, with consideration of what contexts the participants are coming from.
1. Power Distance Index
Who gets to push back?
Power Distance describes how a society handles inequality.
High Power Distance cultures, such as Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, and much of the Arab world, score highly here. Hierarchy is accepted as a natural state of things. Authority figures are not questioned and are deferred to.
In Low Power Distance cultures, such as Denmark, Germany, or the United States, hierarchy is an arrangement where the public and subordinates expect to participate in decisions.
In terms of cultural dissonance, the implications of this are significant.
A patient from a high Power Distance background may sit across from a doctor and answer every question with what they believe the doctor wants to hear. Not because they are being deceptive, but because contradicting an authority figure, especially on that authority figure’s own ground, feels deeply inappropriate. They may downplay symptoms, agree to treatment plans they do not understand, and leave the consultation without having said the thing they came to say.
The same dynamic plays out in professional settings. A team member from a high Power Distance background who is given a task they believe is incorrect will often complete it anyway, in silence. To a manager from a low Power Distance culture, this looks like passivity or lack of initiative. To the team member, it means professional respect.
2. Individualism vs. Collectivism Index
Who is the ‘I’ in this decision?
In highly individualist cultures like the United States, Australia, or the United Kingdom, people are expected to make decisions for themselves, advocate for their own interests, and take personal responsibility for outcomes. Contracts are between individuals. Informed consent is a transaction between a patient and the healthcare provider.
In collectivist cultures like China, Colombia, Indonesia, or much of sub-Saharan Africa, among others, the self is part of a community. A patient might not consider it their place to consent to a procedure without consulting their family. An employee might not accept a promotion without considering what it means for their team. A job candidate might say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.
For anyone involved in drafting consent forms, patient information leaflets, or Human Resources documentation intended for global use, this dimension is particularly important. The concept of individual autonomy that underpins most Western informed consent frameworks is a cultural value.
3. Masculinity vs. Femininity Index
Why assign gender to countries?
This dimension tends to raise eyebrows today, so let’s pause on the terminology before moving on. Hofstede named this dimension based on empirical observations made in the mid to late 20th century.
The values clustering around competitiveness, assertiveness, achievement, and material success were, at the time of his research, more strongly associated with men across cultures. Another cluster of values, like cooperation, modesty, care for others, and quality of life, was more associated with women.
He did not make a normative claim about this, and the dimension has nothing to do with gender roles in any prescriptive sense. This index may just get a modernized name. For now, think of it as a society’s dominant orientation through this question:
Is success defined by winning and standing out, or by harmony and taking care of one another?
Japan scores highest globally in Masculinity. Competition is embedded in its culture, from school examinations to corporate life, and showing vulnerability can carry a significant social cost. Austria, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, United Stated and the United Kingdom also score high on the Masculinity index.
Sweden sits near the opposite end, with a strong cultural emphasis on consensus, work-life balance and care. This applies to men and women alike. Norway, Latvia, the Netherlands and Denmark score slightly higher but still belong to the feminine category.
In practice, a patient from a highly ‘masculine’ culture in Hofstede’s sense may be particularly reluctant to report symptoms that feel like weakness (e.g., fatigue, emotional distress, pain that has become limiting, etc.). For a negotiator or a human resources professional, this means that a team from a culture oriented toward assertiveness and individual achievement will likely respond very differently to conflict resolution, performance reviews, and workplace wellbeing initiatives than a team from a culture oriented toward cooperation and consensus.
4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index
How much ambiguity can we tolerate?
Like individual people, some cultures have a high tolerance for ambiguity while others find it genuinely distressing.
Uncertainty Avoidance — not to be confused with risk avoidance — measures how deeply a culture relies on rules, procedures, and certainty to feel safe. Korea, Japan, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and many Latin American countries score high. China, Singapore, Jamaica or Denmark are on the low end of this index.
In practice, a project manager from a high Uncertainty Avoidance culture who receives a brief specification may generate extensive documentation and ask for written confirmation at every stage. To a colleague from a low UA culture, this person will appear to be needlessly cautious or bureaucratic. In contrast, the colleague from the low UA culture who improvises and adapts on the fly may appear reckless or unprofessional to the first.
Neither is better than the other. Their cultural defaults are just very different.
In regulatory and legal contexts, this dimension is particularly consequential. The level of procedural specificity expected in an application submission, a contract, or a compliance document is also partly cultural.
5. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation
What does relationship-building look like?
This dimension captures a society’s relationship with time and tradition.
Long-term oriented cultures like many East Asian countries, particularly China and Japan, prize perseverance, thrift, and the willingness to invest in future outcomes, sometimes at the cost of immediate results.
Short-term oriented cultures tend to value quick returns, tradition, and social obligations. The United States and many African nations score high on this end of the index.
This plays out clearly in business negotiations. A partner from a long-term oriented culture may spend considerably more time on relationship-building before any commercial conversation begins. A short-term oriented counterpart can view this as poor business sense and leaving money on the table. To the long-term partner, rushing the deal before trust is established is a sign that the other party is not entirely reliable.
6. Indulgence vs. Restraint Index
Is warmth socially acceptable?
In 2010, sociolinguist Michael Minkov added a sixth dimension to Hofstede’s research, which addresses the degree to which a society allows the relatively free expression of basic human desires for enjoying life.
High indulgence cultures like Mexico, much of Latin America, and the United States tend to have a more openly expressive, optimistic communication style. Restraint cultures like Russia, many Eastern European and East Asian countries lean toward more controlled emotional expression in professional contexts.
This is most obviously expressed through tone. What is meant as friendly, warm, and professionally personable in one cultural context can be interpreted as frivolous, unprofessional, or even manipulative by another. Conversely, what feels appropriately formal and serious in a restrained culture can come across as cold, dismissive, unfriendly, or unhelpfully difficult to engage with.
For anyone writing communications that will cross cultural borders, such as marketing copy, onboarding materials, employee manuals, and any public-facing content, this dimension is critically important to consider for successful adaptation. The level of warmth is a cultural key for the interpretation of trustworthiness.
The Cost of Cultural Misunderstanding
I’ll use a medical example here.
Consider a patient who discontinues a medication without telling their doctor. In a high Power Distance culture, admitting that a prescribed treatment is not working, or is causing side effects, can feel like a challenge to the doctor’s authority.
When a patient from a high Power Distance country is asked by a physician from a low Power Distance country how they are getting on with the medication, the patient may say that it helps a bit. The patient is navigating a social dynamic in which complaining about side effects may sound like contradicting a figure of authority. The physician asks the right questions, but the underlying cultural difference doesn’t support straightforward answers.
In the context of clinical outcome assessments (COAs), the instruments used in clinical research are most commonly designed in countries with low Power Distance, high Individualism, high Indulgence and Short-Term Orientation. This profile translates to questions that aim straight to the point, expect honest, straightforward, logical answers without relying on ambiguity to sugar-coat a concept that is culturally charged elsewhere, such as suicidal ideation, diagnostic labels, sexual harassment, sexuality, family planning, and so on. Consequently, if the cultural logic that governs a patient’s response is not accounted for in how the instrument is designed or later linguistically adapted, the data can carry an invisible source of a potentially serious measurement error.
Beyond the clinical setting, the same principle applies wherever communication is built on assumptions that were not made explicit and not culturally examined. A negotiation that breaks down because one party read the other as evasive, when they were being respectful. Or, a training module that comes across as patronizing in one country and empowering in another. Or a human resources policy that is intended to be progressive at home is interpreted as an imposition elsewhere.
Cultural Distance Drives the Extent of Adaptation
Culture gives communication its form.
The professional implications of cultural logic extend across every domain touched by this framework. For translators and localization specialists, Hofstede’s dimensions offer a principled basis for decisions that go beyond vocabulary.
A marketing campaign that succeeds in an individualist market needs more than basic localization to resonate in a collectivist one, and the adaptation process is a deep dive into cultural distance.
For clinicians and researchers, these indices offer a frame for evaluating why ratings across international sites vary despite recalibrations, and why that difference belongs to the cultural context in which the evaluation framework was designed and how it was adapted, rather than to the patient or the physician.
For human resources professionals, they offer a lens for adapting employee handbooks, mental health resources, and workplace training. This is particularly relevant to content conveying sensitive topics like harassment and disclosure, transferred into cultural contexts where the underlying values can differ significantly from those baked into the original.
For lawyers, executives, regulators, and project managers working across borders, they offer a starting point for evaluating why a direct, straightforward approach to close a deal or to run a project may have a better outcome with a little bit more finesse.
Hofstede’s framework does not tell us what humans are likely to do. Behavioural economics has been telling us for decades that human decisions are rarely rational, and that predicting behaviour is only meaningful within a specific, controlled environment. Hofstede’s was the workplace, governed by an employer’s organizational policies, and the desire to improve internal culture.
The framework gives us a way of asking a different question when something doesn’t feel right, or outright falls apart, in a cross-cultural exchange. So, instead of asking, “Why is this person being difficult?”, consider asking, “What am I missing about how this person read the conversation?” and using this model, try to reverse-engineer your new approach.
By the way, this reframe is not about making excuses for intentional bad behaviour. That’s another conversation. It is about thinking through a breakdown, the way a social psychologist might. By finding a way to communicate that is more likely to reach a genuine mutual understanding.
Culture Mapping Tools You Can Try
There are two tools worth knowing about, and they are now run by different organizations:
Geert Hofstede’s Database
Geert Hofstede’s own tool, available at geerthofstede.com and located under the Culture tab, allows you to compare countries and to create bar charts showing country scores across all six dimensions, using data from the official Hofstede database as published in Cultures & Organizations (3rd ed., 2010).
The Culture Factor Group
The successor to Hofstede Insights, now at theculturefactor.com. This is the more polished interactive version, but it has adopted different data for two dimensions, Individualism and Long-Term Orientation, based on a 2022 study by Minkov and Kaasa, which leads to some results that Hofstede himself considered counter-intuitive and methodologically inconsistent with the rest of the model.
If you’ve missed previous editions of the Santium Language Series, you’ll find them here – catch up!
How Santium contributes to this space
Santium provides specialized language services focused on scientific, medical and technical content. We focus on delivering translated materials that work as intended across languages and cultures through translation, linguistic validation and subject-matter specialist review, preserving meaning, function, usability, and measurement integrity in real-world applications.
Follow Santium to stay connected
If you found this article interesting, follow me on LinkedIn and join our newsletter to receive future editions. In the Santium Language Series, I explore interesting traits of the world’s languages, from the most widely spoken to obscure, introducing their structure and word formation to cultural nuance and their role in social norms.
Stay connected and don’t miss the next edition!
References
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
Hofstede, G. (n.d.). Country comparison bar charts. Retrieved from https://geerthofstede.com/country-comparison-bar-charts/
The Culture Factor Group. (n.d.). Country comparison tool. Retrieved from https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Monika Vance
Managing Director | SANTIUM
My work sits at the intersection of linguistics, scientific and medical translation, psychometric measurement, and multilingual operations, where terminology, usability, and regulatory context must align. I write about scientific and medical translations, psychometrics, languages, and the operational challenges that inevitably come with them. I also teach translators how to properly translate and validate complex psychometric instruments to hone their expertise in linguistic validation.
