Sleep & Culture

Could you imagine introducing yourself by saying ‘ Hi, I am so and so and sleeping is one of my favourite pasttimes’? Or what would you think of your local shop owner if you caught him taking a nap the next time you walked in to buy your morning paper? Or a colleague who fell asleep at his desk at lunchtime? Of course, we all need sleep to survive. But based on my own unofficial mini-survey amongst my friends we in our Western cultures seem to take a dim view of people who like to sleep a lot - 'lazy','dull, 'boring' were the key associations my friends came up with. Well, this is not how Asians, in particular the Chinese, would view sleep at all. In fact, people in Chinese groups, however cool, trendy or serious-minded and ambitious don't hesitate to list sleep as a hobby. And looking around in China it's clear that Chinese workers wouldn't be mortified if they were caught having a nap in public during the working day. In the preface to the book “Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West’ by Nicholas Lacarra Mazza, Brigitte Steger suggests ‘practices concerning sleeping (…) can widely differ between cultures and societies' So different cultures attach different values to sleep which then impact on people’s attitude towards it and determine people’s public behaviour with respect to it. In fact, as the same study discovers, the Chinese, tend to be more tolerant to sleeping in public or to day-time sleepers than people in contemporary Western cultures. Possibly this is partially due to longer and less structured working hours and more time spent outside the home where people will simply get caught out by tiredness at some point. However, whatever the reasons, the lesson for us as international researchers is surely the importance of cultural context even when we're examining behaviour which is, on another level, universal. I do not mean to say that our most basic human drives and emotions do not unite people around the world on certain levels. Clearly, international marketing has to and can work with these. However, if even such a biologically driven, seemingly banal phenomenon as sleep is filled with cultural meaning, international researchers really need constantly to interrogate where commonalites end and where cultural differences may start to make a real impact on consumer behaviour or response. A fuller version of this article appears on our website.