The culture guide: how cultures communicate, decide and trust

The eight scales, in plain language

Erin Meyer’s central lesson is that culture is relative. Nobody is simply “direct”; they are more direct than someone else. Each guide places a culture on the same eight scales so you can compare two backgrounds side by side.

The books and researchers behind this library

Each guide draws on widely used cross-cultural frameworks. Read the originals for depth; the summaries here are ours.

• Erin Meyer, The Culture Map (2014). Eight practical scales for how cultures communicate, give feedback, persuade, lead, decide, trust, disagree and schedule. Her core lesson: positions are relative, so what matters is the gap between two cultures.
• Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (1976) and The Dance of Life (1983). High- versus low-context communication and monochronic versus polychronic time, two ideas that still anchor cross-cultural training.
• Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences (1980); Cultures and Organizations (with G. J. Hofstede and M. Minkov). National value dimensions such as individualism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance, drawn from large workplace surveys.
• Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture. Seven dilemmas, including universalism versus particularism and neutral versus emotional expression, about how cultures resolve competing values.
• Richard D. Lewis, When Cultures Collide (1996). The Lewis model groups cultures as linear-active, multi-active and reactive, which is useful for meetings and negotiation.
• The GLOBE study, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations (House et al., 2004). Research across 62 societies on how cultural values shape what people expect from leaders.
• P. Christopher Earley, Soon Ang and David Livermore, Cultural Intelligence (2003); Leading with Cultural Intelligence (2009). Cultural intelligence (CQ) treats adapting across cultures as a skill that can be learned, not a fixed trait.
• Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self,” Psychological Review (1991). Independent and interdependent views of the self, linking culture to how people understand their own personality.

Using AI to prepare for cross-cultural conversations

AI chat tools are good at summarizing frameworks and drafting questions. They are worse at nuance: they can repeat stereotypes, miss regional and generational differences, and sound more certain than the research is. Every culture guide includes a prompt that asks the AI to explain tendencies and where individuals differ, and to suggest questions to ask the person directly.

On Tarock, your cultural backgrounds sit next to your MBTI-style type and Big Five traits. When you match with a friend, partner or coworker, compatibility compares both personality and culture profiles across these scales. AI relationship readings require an accepted match.

Questions people ask

Keep exploring

• Personality and culture: why you feel different in each language
• How others see you: personality blind spots
• What AI personality tests can and cannot tell you
• All personality discovery guides