Outliers: The Story of Success. Malcolm Gladwell. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

Chapter Seven, The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes pp 177–223.

He analyzes an account of a 1997 plane crash of Korean Air, one of several by that airline, to show how it was caused by cultural misunderstanding. One factor was mitigated speech, the “attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigated when we’re being polite, or when we’re ashamed or embarrassed, or when we’re being deferential to authority.” It’s this last that was catastrophic. Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede developed a measurement of human behavior based on culturally formed standards, with his “individualism-collectivism scale.” Asians are high on the collectivism side, while in the US we’re the opposite. Another of his “dimensions” is “uncertainty avoidance,” manifested by the extent to which a culture does or doesn’t adhere to established rules and plans regardless of circumstance.

Then there’s the power-distance communication factor (PDI = Power Distance Index). In Asian cultures, where hierarchy is important, it is high. A captain outranks the first officer, so the first officer has to be deferential and can’t speak his mind.

These phenomena proved to be deadly, when subordinate officers were too polite to stand up strongly to the captain, who was making bad flight choices. The objections were muted: mitigated. And the plane crashed.

“To Western ears, it seems strange that the flight engineer would bring up [the subject of trouble he sees on the weather radar] just once. Western communication has what linguists call a ‘transmitter orientation’—that is, that it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. (…)

“But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer’s mind, he has said a lot.

Another factor can be the difference between cultures. In examining the crash of a plane piloted by a Colombian captain, the author finds that language was one barrier. English is the international language of the flight world. He had to ask his crew to translate the air traffic control instructions from English to Spanish. Another was mitigated speech, this time not because of hierarchy but politeness. New York City air traffic controllers tell it like it is. They bark orders, and they expect that someone will bark back when there’s an emergency. But instead, the he flight crew was too polite to argue that they needed to land, now. Instead, they were intimidated by the manner of ATC. “The guy is angry” said the copilot to the captain of the ATCs at Kennedy. Shortly after, they crashed.