60 I Can Read You Like a Book
This same thing takes affect when you walk into a new office,
new school, or new relationship. The difference, in most cases, is
that you speak the same language, eat the same food, and have at
least some gesturing and acceptable behaviors in common. You see
and identify or become the new alpha, and the culture adapts.
Sometimes you get caught between cultures until you’re really
sure what all the “rules” of the new culture are. A great place to
watch this cultural evolution is school, whether it’s first grade or
college. You utter sounds, wear clothes, add body adornments, and
make gestures that attract those who want to attract. Some of the
efforts are very much on the conscious level and some of them are
not. Often, until you’re sure who it is you want to attract—and this
applies to people in whom you’re interested sexually as well as
people you want as non-sexual companions—you might send mixed
messages. You wear the clothes of the type of people you aim to
spend time with, but may not have captured their vocabulary or
cadence of speech, for example.
Through this adaptation we all learn to be successful organ-
isms within a culture, whether a microculture or super-culture.
Exposure is the key. We adapt skills that work, and we orchestrate
their use with other skills that we learn as we go. When we move
to a new place and the skills no longer produce the desired result,
we have no concept or location to store that information. We start
to grasp for something that will work. The chimp in us wins. We
instinctively know that emulating the alpha’s behavior is better
than not.
InRangers Lead the Way (Adams Media, 2003), former U.S.
Army Ranger Dean Hohl talks about the cultural differences among