The Night’s Watch never feels fully at ease under Craster’s roof.
In George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros, the guardsmen of the northern border, the Night’s Watch, have a longstanding business agreement with a cranky old coot out in no-man’s-land. They bring him goods he can’t get that far north and he offers them the safety, warmth and food of his homestead. ‘Guest right’ in Westeros is an ancient law of hospitality. Once a host offers food or drink and a guest consumes it, they may not harm each other for the duration of the visit or risk being cursed by the gods.
Martin has created a rich, fantastic world, but he didn’t cut it from whole cloth. It is known. He openly adapts real-world elements to fit his fantasy, including the idea that offering food to another person communicates, “I am not hostile toward you.” In fact, this seems to be quite universal in the real world. Despite Craster following the letter of the law each time the Watch stops at his homestead, they never feel truly safe and they know very well they aren’t really welcome. He keeps the best food and wine for himself while serving the Watch meager rations. They pick up other signals, as well, and are wary.
Even just reading the story I feel the prick of Craster’s coldness and stinginess. Why does it sting like that? Social psychologists point to two dimensions humans use to make sense of those around us. One is warmth and the other is competence. If I perceive warm signals from you – friendliness, sincerity, generosity – I read those as good intentions toward me and, of course, the opposite if the signals seem cold. If I perceive you to be competent – intelligent, efficient, assertive – then I know how well you can execute the warm or cold intentions. Basically, warmth allows me to feel safe, prosocial, cooperative; coldness leaves me guarded, resistant.
Recognizing warmth indicators would really matter, then. Good thing humans are so good at reading emo-… oh wait. We’re good at reading the emotions of people from our own group – culture, if you will – and not too bad if we’re reading people from groups we’ve had proximity to, but reading people we aren’t familiar with (on a group level, not individuals) can trip us up. It’s a classic case of looking for, but never finding, the signals we are familiar with and misreading the signals we do encounter. Different cultures express warmth, and everything contained within it, differently.
Guest right is an explicit custom in all of Westeros; our hospitality traditions vary more. The Arab/Islamic world is famous for how it shows hospitality. While much of it may appear as a ritual, there is genuine care and generosity toward guests and newcomers. The sheer abundance of food offered is remarkable. Guests are usually greeted and escorted in rather than left to find their own way; in many cases guests receive the finest portions. That’s warm. Further along the map in Japan, hospitality tradition encourages a host to quietly meet the needs of guests, without making a show of any of it. Anticipate what can be good and produce it. Allow for the other to create the relationship with you rather than present him with a finished product. That’s warm. In America, where I’m from, we often communicate real warmth by treating our guests as if they were family. That could even mean you help prepare a meal or clean up after it. We tell everyone to ‘make yourself at home’ and we mean it. So warm.
We also smile a lot in America; we’re an absurdly smiley people. We mean it well. It should convey warmth, trustworthiness. And it often does! But a smile’s significance is actually not universal. In some cultures a smile shows the other person that you are less intelligent and in some cultures even that you are less trustworthy. Yikes! How about touching each other? Physical touch plays an important role in helping us regulate our nervous systems, in our sense of felt safety. That’s human. Yet how we experience touch differs greatly between cultures. One study found close parallels between types of touching in Japan and the UK, but touch itself was more pleasant for the UK participants. Another study found that South African participants rated touch as more positive than UK participants and this was reflected in the electrical activity of their brains.
So while touch universally affects our nervous systems, a genuine smile is universally recognized by the eye crinkles and offering food is a universal indication of non-violence, when different cultures meet, as is so common these days, the signals can get crossed and we can start to feel more like the Night’s Watch at Craster’s, being told we’re welcome, but feeling in our bones we are not.
This situation comes up all the time in international business. A quick chat with your AI of choice and you will find out all about the role this plays in negotiations. It makes sense, right? If we perceive warmth from our counterparts, we attribute good intentions to them, we feel safe and trust them, business runs more smoothly. Both ancient wisdom and science fact (a paper published in International Business Review in 2012 addresses this). Naturally, if we misinterpret each others’ warmth signals, business will hit road bumps and the better we prepare for meeting our counterparts, the better equipped we are to signal warmth to them in a way they will understand it. These are certainly important moments, but they are also relatively short-lived.
Think of multicultural teams, workplaces where any number of immigrants go every day with their local colleagues. As members of ongoing working groups, how welcome do they feel? If they don’t recognize warmth signals, what does it do to them? How can they be expected to consistently cooperate with and trust their colleagues? These questions hit close to home for me since I moved to Sweden, a country whose people are often described as ‘cold’. Hm. A few of the warmth markers I mentioned earlier were friendliness, sincerity, generosity. I can both state positively that I have experienced these things from Swedish people and that I do not recognize any of the markers I would look for based on my own culture.
How Swedish culture expresses its warmth is so restrained that, I would posit, it’s hard for any foreigner to find it. This is what I hear over and over again in my work – Swedes are not inviting, Swedes are not interested, Swedes are stingy, Swedes have no emotions. While I understand that feeling very well, I also have to acknowledge that Swedish friendliness shows itself in their consistency toward me, Swedish sincerity in that they will never exaggerate when speaking to me, Swedish generosity in their willingness to stick with the conversation topic of my choice. Very. Understated. But present.
And yet, recently, during the coffee/fika break at the extremely Swedish organization I volunteer with, I sat at a table with a British woman and an Iranian man. The man had placed a small plate of fruit in the center of the table. I looked at it, contemplating whether the placement of the plate indicated it was for the whole table or whether the size of the plate indicated that it was his private stash. I glanced up. He caught my eye. Then he very subtly, very gently pushed the plate toward me. And I felt… warm.
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