An interesting real life example from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers‘ (see your OUP book p214-5): Korean airline crashes resulting form High Power Distance cultre of the cockpit.
- Dynamics of power ingrained into Korean pilots
- status is determined before speaking to a person; different verbs and pronouns etc for differing status
- Co-pilot is inferior to the pilot, he can never say “I have a problem”, co-pilot may never challenge the pilot, must ingratiate himself with the pilot through gift giving
- Backwards language, “that’s a very interesting mountain that we are heading directly for”
- Recommendations: speak English only when flying, change titles for co-pilot and pilot
- Loss of face is very important concept
psychologyrocks 