Nguyen Thi Bich Duyen

1632309007
SOC 144
Assignment 2

Topic: “How culture drives behaviors at TEDtalks by Julien S Bourrelle

After listening and watching carefully from Jullien S Bourrelle through the presentation
of “How culture drives behaviours” in TEDtalks, I am really interested in a quote of him: “We
all see the world through cultural glasses. The lens through which year brain sees the worlds
shapes your reality. If you can change the lens, not only can you change the way your brain
perceives behaviors, but you can change the people relate to cultural differences”.

It is so true to me that every country has its own cultural glass. Among many cultural
glasses, our brain will shape what we see through the lens of the glasses. If we change our lens,
we can understand and change our behaviors to be suitable with the cultures differences that we
think we couldn’t adapt to them before.

There is a real example that I suppose to this case is when I went to Germany to visit my
relatives within 3 weeks last year. In the imagination that I still worn Vietnamese cultural glass
when I had just landed to Germany. Therefore, I felt the German people were so weird when
they drank beer in the morning, even when they were working. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people
usually drink coffee and Western people drink milk in the morning, thus the German people are
so different compared to other countries over the world. Wondering for a while, I then asked
people around my area to understand why they drank beer every morning. After being explained,
I felt like I put my lens of Vietnamese cultural glass off, I then change the lens of German
cultural glass. I didn’t feel drinking beer at workplace or in the morning was so weird anymore. I
understand that there are many differences in culture between Germany and Vietnam. Therefore,
I totally agree with Julien S Buurrelle that “If you can change the lens, not only you change the
way your brain perceives behaviors. After the vacation ended, I came back to Vietnam and told
to my friends about some cultural differences of Germany including drinking beer at workplace
or in the morning in the comparison of Vietnam, they didn’t feel weird like me before, instead of
that they felt that culture was so exciting and interesting to know and try like German people. As
the result, when we change our perspective into other situations, we not only change our
behaviors, but we also can change the people around us.