Introduction
How does it work ?
For teachers
About culture
About the project
Privacy
Terms of use
Introduction
The Culture Simulator is a cross-cultural digital training tool available free of charge to anyone interested in cultural differences and wanting to understand more about another country’s culture. The Culture Simulator in paper form was devised by Fiedler, Mitchell, Triandis and others from the University of Illinois, USA (1971). From the 1990s, it was further developed by Alexander Thomas of the University of Regensburg (Germany) in a series of booklets entitled Beruflich in… (after which the name of a country follows). The Culture Simulator on this website is fully digital and covers a number of different countries. It will be available in six languages: English, French, Polish, Italian, German and Dutch. Initially this training tool was called a ‘Culture Assimilator’, but we chose the name ‘Culture Simulator’ by analogy with the ‘flight simulator’.
The Culture Simulator challenges you to find the most likely explanation for behaviour in other cultures that differ from what you yourself are used to.
The Culture Simulator focuses primarily on cultural differences within Europe and currently offers Simulators that introduce you to the culture of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.
The Culture Simulator focuses on situations in the work environment. It is primarily intended for international business, management students and people working in international business. But the cultural behaviour patterns visible in a work environment also play a role in the rest of society, of course, and so the Culture Simulator is also of interest to anyone who wants to immerse themselves in a country’s culture.
How does it work?
Select your favourite language and, from the list of countries, choose a country you want to know more about. Then you start the Simulator. You are presented with 20 different stories that take place in the workplace in that country, and you have to find an explanation as to why the people in the story behave the way they do (differently from you). You can choose from four different explanations. When you click on an explanation, you get immediate feedback on whether it is likely or not and why. Once you have found the most likely explanation, you will see a deeper explanation of the cultural logic behind this behaviour. The same logic can affect many more behaviours, and so you may encounter this logic several times in the Culture Simulator. This shows the consistency in the behaviour of people in that country. After a round of 20 stories, you get to see your score. If you immediately selected the best explanation for all stories, you will get 100 points, if you did not immediately find the most likely answer you will score lower. You can do another round of 20 stories and repeat this as many times as you like. With each round, some of the stories will be renewed.
In the future, to use the Culture Simulator, it is necessary to register. This enables your score to be saved. In future attempts, you will be able to see if you have scored better than previously. Registration also ensures that unfinished rounds are saved, ready to be continued later.
For teachers
At this moment, the Culture Simulator can be used as individual training for your students. They can access it via
https://culturesimulator.org/en/home-en/
and try out the Simulator for one or more countries. In the future, several other ways to use the Culture Simulator will be added.
The Culture Simulator introduces students to concrete foreign cultures, but the effect of this learning tool does not end there. We think that once they begin to understand one foreign culture, they also begin to better understand what culture and cultural differences mean in general, and realise what it takes to make sense of another culture. In short, we think that when they are trained with the Culture Simulator, they will increase their overall intercultural skills and will more easily be able to understand very different cultures.
About culture
The Culture Simulator trains the users to look at culture in a certain way, and there are clear scientific views behind it.
Our approach to culture is not based on a general model with a number of dimensions. We assume that cultures have unique characteristics that require separate detailed descriptions and cannot be measured along the same yardstick.
The stories in Culture Simulator go beyond etiquette rules or simple facts about another country’s customs. We want to provide insights into the deeper motivations people in other countries have for behaving in a different way than we do.
The aim is not to present stereotypical or generalised views of different nationalities. The stories in the Culture Simulator are based on real-life situations that expats have shared with us during interviews. These are not deterministic theories about how a culture works. They are grounded in specific experiences people have had while living and working in another country. We do not suggest that everyone in a culture behaves the same way — far from it. However, when certain behaviours do come up again and again, we look at what might be driving them. The goal is to understand the why behind the actions, not to label people, and to reflect the complexity of real cultural encounters
Our approach is interpretive: We are concerned with finding the most plausible explanation for the typical behaviour that occurs in the story. Of course, we are never absolutely sure why someone in a given situation acts the way he or she does, but we can say something about what is more or less likely and which explanation is clearly not valid. This is how we teach students to weigh up different options about behaviour abroad.
About the project
The Culture Simulator has been developed by five European universities as part of the CAPIRE project (2022-2025), funded by the European Union: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Toruń, Poland; Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, France; Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy; Universität Osnabrück, Germany; and Universiteit Twente in Enschede, Netherlands. Scientists from Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland interviewed compatriots working in one of the other countries. The stories in the Culture Simulator are thus based on true-life situations experienced by expats in another European country. They therefore describe the most common cultural differences that expats can experience in a country. For didactic reasons, the stories have sometimes been slightly rewritten and tightened up. The description of the cultural logic behind the behaviour has been checked and co-described by scholars from the country where the story takes place.
The following persons collaborated on the project: Pawel Brzustewicz, Claudia Cavallari, Sylvie Chevrier, Sarah Dhaiby, Arnold Enklaar, Helen Eve, Aldona Glińska-Neweś, Louisa Joyce Kersten, Karsten Müller, Katarzyna Pawlonka, Simone Pulcher, Svenja Schumacher, Nienke Smit, Lia Tirabeni, and Anna Wiegand. The digital platform was built by Junior ESIEE students at ESIEE Paris.
Suggestions and new stories are welcome. We would also like to add new countries in the future.
Culture Simulator content is managed by an editorial board that can improve existing stories in Culture Simulator and add new ones.
New stories submitted to and approved by the Culture Simulator are subject to the same Creative Commons protection as the other stories in the Culture Simulator (see Terms of use).
Privacy
The Culture Simulator platform stores users’ email addresses, passwords, and other data (organization or company and location).
Data is used exclusively for the functioning of the platform and to inform users, but is expressly not provided to third parties.
Terms of use
The content of the Culture Simulator platform can be used under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator: “From: www.culturesimulator.org”
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
