[MUSIC] Those cultural knowledge, those cultural dimensions are very helpful for us to understand a group as a whole. However, can you think of some downside of using such cultural knowledge? One mistake women make is when they commit cultural stereotypes. Stereotypes isn't cultural knowledge. They're knowledge about a general behavior tendency of a group, as a whole, as a collective. But that knowledge may not be applicable to every single individual in that group. Cultural stereotypes, they are useful in some situations. For example, they serve the first best guess when we meet people from a a new cultural group, we use that knowledge to make our estimation. But then we have to modify the information and our assumptions based on further interaction with them and observation of the behaviors. But if we don't, there is a dangerous risk that we commit cultural stereotypes and then we make serious mistakes about them. If we use cultural level knowledge to make judgements about individuals we may make serious mistakes. The second caution I like to highlight is cultural change. Countries are all changing. Especially, nowadays with more contact between countries, cultures are changing, and evolving very slowly. Therefore, we have to be careful about the cultural knowledge we use. We have to be cautious about whether knowledge about a certain country is still up to date. We have to be aware where there has been an historical event that can change traditional values to a very large extent. For example, China has been going through a radical economic reform in the last few decades. If you go to China today, you can find the younger generation today, they have become more individualistic than their older generation. Now we know something about the general cultural framework, and if you go to a specific country, you may want to find more specific knowledge about that country. Now with that cultural knowledge, where do we go from there? We need cultural mindfulness to help us utilize such knowledge. What is cultural mindfulness? Let me give you an example of the opposite of being mindful, so mindless. Please think about how you go to school or go to work everyday and let's say, for example, you drive to work everyday and you take the same route. Think about how many times has that happened to you, after a long, exhausting day, you get into your car, you turn on the radio, you take the same route back home. You make a left turn at that traffic light and you turn right at the end of that road and then you arrive home and you have no memory of what happened on the way back. If that has ever happened to you, that is not being mindful, that is being mindless. Because a task is so routine, we do this everyday, we don't need to allocate cognitive resources to those tasks and we go through an automatic process. Being mindful is being attentive to your cognitive process. It's like having a voice talking to you in the back of your head, but it's not like having Multiple Personality Disorder, and this voice acts like a supervisor. It monitors and supervises your learning activities and behaviors in the intercultural interactions. There are three elements in cultural mindfulness. First, awareness of the impact of culture, including how cultures influence the others and our own behaviors and assumptions. Second, consciously analyze the impact of culture on our behavior, our reactions to each other, and thirdly, planning our behavior accordingly. Now we have the cultural knowledge about the behaviors, values and assumptions, and we're also mindful of their influences and then plan our behaviors accordingly. How does that knowledge and mindfulness translate to the behaviors because at the end of the day, how you behave in neo culture context matters. [MUSIC]