Sheena Iyengar, the author of The Art of Choosing, once ordered a cup of green-tea-with-sugar at a restaurant in Japan.
The Japanese waiter, after a pause, told her that one was not supposed to drink green tea with sugar.
Sheena told him that she was aware of this custom in Japan, but she liked her tea sweet.
The waiter repeated his apprehensions courteously and discouraged Sheena from ordering sugar with green tea.
Sheena still insisted politely to have sugar with her tea, and the waiter went away to take up this issue with his manager.
Finally, the manager came over to Sheena and said, “I am very sorry. We don’t have sugar.”
Sheena then changed her order to a cup of coffee, which was served with two packets of sugar on the saucer.
Sheena shares this personal experience in her astonishing (highly recommended) book The Art of Choosing to demonstrate the cultural differences between countries (such as Japan) where societal preferences are valued more than individual preferences and countries (such as America), where reasonable personal preferences are seen as individual rights and are judged favorably.
Remarkable work in understanding cross-cultures has been done by the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede. Use his model to compare different countries on different social dimensions here.
