Cultural Knowledge for Intelligence Analysts: Expertise in Cultural Sensemaking

To be in a position to understand and anticipate the beliefs and actions of individuals from other cultures, analysts need insight into “what it is like to be them.” There is a tremendous amount of cultural information that analysts might use to interpret the activities of members of foreign populat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American intelligence journal 2013-01, Vol.31 (2), p.28-37
Main Authors: Rasmussen, Louise J., Sieck, Winston R., Hoffman, Robert R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Central Asian culture
Cognitive models
Cross cultural studies
Cultural education
Intelligence
Military culture
Native culture
Reasoning
Sense making
Slavic culture
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Summary:To be in a position to understand and anticipate the beliefs and actions of individuals from other cultures, analysts need insight into “what it is like to be them.” There is a tremendous amount of cultural information that analysts might use to interpret the activities of members of foreign populations, and the specific information they need depends on the problem they are given. In this article the authors argue that strategies for engaging in cultural sensemaking allow analysts to discover what cultural information they need to understand particular problems and to acquire this knowledge on an ongoing basis. As such, cultural sensemaking strategies offer an alternative to the notion of providing analysts with an initial framework or pre-specified items of knowledge that theoretically would allow them to parse and understand a culture. Instead, cultural sensemaking provides a foundation for analysts to build their own culturally-relevant mental models of another culture, and refine them over time. The authors outline a number of specific strategies for cultural sensemaking that they have uncovered in their studies of cross-cultural expertise and describe their application to intelligence analysis.
ISSN:0883-072X