A while ago, I parked my car in Geneva. The Swiss one, not the one in Illinois, Nebraska, or New York.

I wasn’t sure whether I needed to pay, so I approached a police officer who had just walked by.

“Do I need to pay in the blue zones on Saturday?”

The agony in the look of the police officer was telling.

Who was this person that had the audacity to approach an authority without saying “Bonjour madame” first?

If I had said the same in Amsterdam, I would have just gotten a “yes” as a reply, and life would have continued.

In the French-speaking world, however, politeness is really important. You can’t start speaking without saying bonjour first.

These social expectations have their origins in the cultural dimension of power distance.

Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.
- Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind

You might think, how are politeness and power related?

Logically, respect for older people doesn’t have much to do with power, per se. But they are, nevertheless, related.

For instance, an article in the journal of applied linguistics proved students from high power distance (PD) countries use more formal greetings and closings (Dear sir, yours sincerely, etc.) than those of low PD cultures. Low PD people use informal alternatives (hi, cheers, etc.).

Back to the police officer in Geneva… doesn’t Switzerland rank lower on the power distance scale than the Netherlands?

Yes, they do.

This simply shows that it’s really hard to assign a culture as a monolith to a country. Switzerland has French, Italian, and German-speaking parts, all with different cultural origins. The big (egalitarian) German population pulls Switzerland as a whole down on the power distance scale.

The Netherlands has a Catholic part (the south) and a Protestant part (the big cities). Amsterdam is much more egalitarian than the Dutch regions close to Belgium.

Evidently, the south of the Netherlands celebrates carnival, but the north doesn’t.

Does religion influence culture, and power distance in particular?

There are plenty of aspects that influence culture — many more than religion. The climate, the empirical past, its geo-political and geographical location, etc, etc.

I, however, believe that the difference between the Catholic and Protestant churches illustrates really well how cultures emerged throughout time.

So, allow me to use this specific example as one of the reasons contemporary cultures originate in events that happened hundreds of years ago.

I don’t want to give a history of Christianity, but the Reformation is an important event in world history. The protestant movement evolved out of disagreement with the Vatican.

The Reformation resulted in a less hierarchical Lutheran institute.

For the protestants, their relationship with God is direct, whereas Catholics often speak via an intermediary, the priest. You’d go to church to confess to a priest who then communicates with God on your behalf.

The Catholic church is a hierarchical pyramid. The Vatican has a leader surrounded by a council, the College of Cardinals. They are supported by bishops and priests, who ultimately serve the people.

The protestant movement doesn’t have an equivalent to the pope or an elaborate hierarchical system.

Many businesses in Catholic countries are organised similarly to the Vatican. French companies have — on average — more management layers than enterprises in the Germanic world.

To give an idea of the importance of hierarchy, the CEO of a French company is called a PDG, le Président Directeur Général.

What does power distance in society really mean?

Once again, religion is one of the aspects that influence power distance, but it’s not the only one.

Countries are positioned somewhere on the power distance scale, from fairly egalitarian (Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, and German-speaking countries) to hierarchical (A number of east-Asian, Arabic and Latin American countries).

Respect for a supervisor and obeying orders is naturally important in high-PD countries. In egalitarian countries, it’s more accepted to disagree with your hierarchy openly.

Other visible aspects of PD are how independent children are (are they treated differently than adults — within reason — or not?), how the government is organized (single decision maker vs coalition culture), and whether wealth inequality is accepted.

How does Power Distance influence tech?

High PD cultures accept power imbalances in social and professional relationships. One person can be more important than another.

Can this principle be applied to social media, too?

Yahoo Research has investigated power balance in their study Cultural Dimensions in Twitter.

They analysed online relationships by looking at the number of followers of the various users. Is someone with more followers considered more important?

The researchers considered who follows whom, who recommends whom, and who starts to follow whom upon a recommendation.

They found evidence for their hypothesis:

In countries comfortable with Power Distance, a pair of users who engage in any type of relationship is likely to show in-degree imbalance.

The results clearly show that the more PD a country has, the more a user gains popularity when its followers increase.

(I therefore encourage you to follow me on Medium ;))

Social media leads to less formal language

My encounter with the Genevan police officer shows how communication can be culturally defined.

Researchers at the University of Wolverhampton investigated what the impact of social media would be on communication between professors and students, particularly in Palestine.

They found that social media was “breaking the boundaries of hierarchy and authority.” Students were more at ease when expressing ideas on social media than in the physical classroom.

One educator explains that “they don’t feel the hierarchy that exists inside the class or on the learning management system”.

A drawback of social media is that messages don’t stop after working hours.

In Palestinian culture it is not appropriate to disregard a personal message that someone sends on an informal platform (“it’s like someone is knocking your door”). As a result, they feel obliged to reply to the personal messages, which typically contain requests or questions, after work or during vacations.

The study shows a divide between supporters and opponents of integrating social media into the local education system.

Which option would be better is not so relevant for this article.

The important takeaway is that social media leads to less formal communication, particularly in high PD cultures.

High PD cultures prefer established brands

Users can increase their personal brand with a higher number of followers. Professionals can become more respectable with different job titles.
How companies can leverage PD can be observed in the travel industry.

A particularly interesting study is the article “How power distance affects online hotel ratings.”

In the paper, Chinese scientists investigate the relationship between hotel brands and UX. They conclude that people from high PD cultures have more trust in hotel chains than in independent, small hotels.

Hotel chains, like Marriott or Radisson, can rely on their brand name and authority in the industry.

When we look at Booking.com and Agoda, we notice this difference. Booking.com, which is more popular in the West, displays pictures of hotel rooms on its pages. On the other hand, Agoda, prefered in Asia, shows pictures of the hotel buildings.

From this, we can gather that Agoda’s users prefer getting familiar with the hotel brand first. Meanwhile, Booking.com’s users like to check out how comfortable the rooms and beds are before diving into the other details of the hotel.

What kind of photos a website chooses tells a lot about the culture of the company or its country.

In high PD cultures, photos of leaders, CEOs, and professors are frequently used. In low PD cultures, the people, students, or nature are often shown.

You can find examples of this in my article How does our cultural background influence product design?

High PD cultures rely more on structure

High PD cultures have a more hierarchical society. They are, therefore, exposed to more structure. They live in a clearly defined society.

This leads to a strong desire for structure for various aspects of life.

Scientists from the University of Texas showed that people from high PD cultures see imaginary patterns in random black and white dots.

They naturally create structure when it doesn’t exist.

This has also been proven by a study that shows high PD cultures selectively see structure in many contexts. This could refer to tangible things in nature or intangible aspects such as political, religious, social, and scientific beliefs.

High PD individuals seek efficient ways of organising. For instance, when ranking products on a website.

When deciding whether a product is good or bad, it can be helpful for them to not look into too much detail of each product.

This leads high PD cultures to rely more on the price of a product to define its quality than on contextual aspects.

It’s easy to rank a list of products on price, but it gets much more complicated when product attributes need to be considered.

An article in the Journal of Consumer Research investigates exactly this phenomenon.

The study asked participants to rank products on quality:

High (versus low) power distance belief participants perceived a significantly greater correlation between price and quality

High PD cultures are slower convinced to use tech

Before our users look into the price and characteristics of our products, they first need to be convinced our app is worth using.

How do we do that?

The Department of Information Systems of the University of the Western Cape looked into the role of culture in the adoption of mobile applications, particularly in rural South African areas.

How can we encourage people to use medical apps, like digital diabetic assistants?

The researchers found that in high PD cultures, users are much more likely to listen to the advice of specialists.

The data shows that diabetic patients are less likely to adopt and use a mobile application if their doctors do not inform them about it or if they perceive that their doctors would not be in favour of them using mobile applications for self-management activities.
This suggests that people accept and adhere to the hierarchical order, which in this context is healthcare professionals.

Diabetic patients comply with the opinions of their doctors as they fear disagreeing with them. As such, this may result in having a positive influence on a participant’s ability to adopt and use mobile applications.

The issue with this study is that they didn’t compare their results with data from less high PD cultures.

However, the research has been built upon a vast body of studies that have proven the relationship between PD and adoption.

An article in the International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, by Pınar Özbilen, examined and confirmed the following hypothesis:

Countries with a high power distance score will show a lower rate of new technology adoption at firm-level than countries with a low power distance score.

These findings are in line with conclusions in similar studies like this, this, this, this, this, or this one.

Another aspect of people’s lack of digital adoption might result from an unwillingness to change.

There is also a negative relationship between power distance and resistance. This has been confirmed in this, this, and this article.

Connecting the concepts

With all that we learned from these studies, we can put together how we can tailor our products for low PD or high PD markets.

In low-PD countries, people prefer to make their own choices, so promoting a product can be done through reviews, influencers, etc.

High PD countries might need a bit more time to be convinced that digital ones can replace their offline behaviours.

An authority in the field in which you operate can be the most effective person to convince your target audience to start using your product.

Once a user group understands that it wants to use a product, they have to choose which one. Yours or that of your competitor. Price might be important, but it can also harm you.

High-PD cultures might be inclined to think that a cheaper product might be of inferior quality.

The best way to work around this is to establish your brand as an authority. You might have a CEO that has credibility or an established name. Or you might even have social media channels endorsed by many followers.

Of all the articles I recently wrote about UX and multiculturalism, this is the one that has the least amount of tangible interaction design suggestions.

Power distance is more about how to communicate and present yourself and your product than it impacts preferences about colour, navigation structure, or typography.

Although we might enjoy our time in Figma, this illustrates well that we should absolutely not forget that our tone of voice, UX writing, and photography are a very big part of the User Experience, and that localisation is a fair bit more than simply translating your UI.

Not tailoring your page structure to that of your users is similar to asking a question without starting with Bonjour.

Au revoir.