I don’t know about you, but I like starting the day with some coffee and reading, checking the news (and social media… yes, guilty!) or going back to saved bookmarks. Recently I’ve been saving a significant amount of articles that I thought would be good to share with you at some point. I therefore decided to start a new cycle where I would recommend some of the more interesting ones around the topics of cross-cultural relations, communication, business and psychology.

I’ll try to keep the lists relatively short, with reading time less than half hour, so that you can read them in one go 🙂

So let’s get started!

1. The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your Mind – a very interesting read, not only from a sociological perspective, but also from a business point of view. It’s amazing to realize just how careful you need to be with whatever you share via the internet, either about your strategy or values, or what opinions you as a company or an individual express in various social media channels. Of course you probably know it already, but to realize just how the spreading mechanism works adds extra value to your business awareness.

Reading time: ~5 min

2. How to win (and lose) friendships across cultures: Why relational mobility matters – a relatively long read, but giving a nice context to the topic covered. To synthesize, it covers three main strategies for acquiring and retaining new relations within big society groups (for example big cities), where you have plenty of opportunities to meet new people: a. self-enhancement – consider yourself worthy of contact and approaching you, b. general trust – be open to any communication with strangers as it may as well result in long-lasting relationships, and c. self-disclosure – reveal some sort of sensitive, personal information about yourself, showing that you are willing to be vulnerable with that person and communicate openly.

Reading time: ~10 min

3. That’s not fair – children in different cultures have different standards of fairness – Something for parents and educators out there. The research was done only on three groups of children, but already showed some significant differences. Again, I hope the authors will continue experimenting with other cultural groups to come up with a pattern of behaviour in these cultures. I wonder how much the personality traits would influence (or bias?) this experiment – it’s because I can imagine children who just want to have-it-all, draw the attention and are born leaders (dictators?) as well as the ones who are just naturally quiet, rather submissive, stick to the rules and give way to authority. Do you have any ideas how much impact that could have?

Reading time: ~3 min

I hope you found these links interesting! Make sure to let me know via email or in the comments below! Any suggestions for the content are more than welcome of course, so I’m looking forward to hearing what topics would you like to see linked in this series!