What actually builds culture (and what doesn't)

The World Cup starts today, which means for the next few weeks we will be seeing a lot of orange in the Netherlands. Flags, scarves, and the occasional inflatable crown. Once more we’ll stand united in a colour that suits almost nobody, and somehow manage to all look equally questionable.

But it is interesting, this sense of shared national pride.

I recently came across a piece of research that I found particularly insightful on the subject. The Pew Research Center asked more than 33,000 people across 25 countries one open-ended question: what makes you proud of your country?

The researchers left the question deliberately open, wanting to see what people would reach for without being given categories to choose from. And what people reached for was almost never politics.

The Dutch mentioned their waterway management. Indonesians talked about their spices. Australians described mateship, the particular quality of looking out for your friends. Brazilians talked about their people being welcoming and flexible. Japanese respondents mentioned safety, diversity, soft power. South Africans spoke about holding together as a rainbow nation despite everything. Italians cited food and the Renaissance in the same breath. Hungarians were split — some proud of their intellectual output, others explicitly not proud, citing their current government as a reason.

What struck me was how consistently people reached for the concrete and the cultural rather than the abstract and the political. Not "our constitution" but "our spices." Not "our GDP" but "our people." Not "our military" but "our Nobel Prize winners."

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel spent much of his career studying how people form and maintain group identities. His Social Identity Theory proposes that we derive a significant part of our sense of self from the groups we belong to, and that we are strongly motivated to see those groups positively. But what Tajfel also found was that the content of group identity, what the group actually stands for in people's minds, is shaped by shared experiences and shared symbols rather than formal membership. You do not feel Dutch because of your passport. You feel Dutch because of something more textured and lived than that.

The Pew findings map almost perfectly onto this. People's national pride is anchored in things they have actually experienced or participated in. Food you have eaten. People who have helped you. A landscape you have walked through. A cultural export you have felt reflected something true about where you come from. These are not abstract claims. They are context. And context, as behavioural science keeps showing us, is where identity actually lives.

What I find most hopeful about this research is the gap it reveals between what ordinary people say they are proud of and what political discourse assumes they care about. In a period when national identity is being weaponised almost everywhere, the actual humans being appealed to turn out to be proud of remarkably human things. Warmth. Creativity. Honesty. The way their neighbours behave in a crisis.

This is not naive. People are also capable of exclusive and fearful nationalism. But the baseline, when you simply ask people without steering them, skews toward connection rather than division. That feels worth holding onto.

How to use this insight:

The gap between what people actually value and what institutions assume they value is one of the most reliable sources of missed opportunity in leadership, policy, and organisational design.

If you lead a team or an organisation, it is worth asking the same kind of open question that Pew asked. Not "how satisfied are you with your work?" but "what are you most proud of here?" The answers will almost certainly surprise you. They will be more specific, more personal, and more cultural than any engagement survey would have predicted. And they will tell you something true about what the group actually is, as opposed to what the strategy document says it should be.

The same principle applies to building any kind of community, whether a neighbourhood, a company, a school, or a team. Shared identity is not built through mission statements or values posters. It is built through shared experiences, shared symbols, and the accumulated texture of daily life together. The question for anyone trying to strengthen a group is not: what do we stand for? It is: what do we do together that nobody else does quite like us?

In a world that is very loud about identity, the most powerful identity signals are often the quietest ones. The way meetings start in your company. The food at your team lunches. The joke that only makes sense if you were there. These are not trivial. They are the spices and the waterways. They are what people will reach for when someone asks what makes them proud. Even if it means dressing in a colour so bright it practically hurts your eyes.

Researchers at Stanford University found that stories are recalled up to 22 times more effectively than facts alone. When information is embedded in a narrative with a character, a problem, and a resolution, it activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, including those associated with sensory experience and emotion, not just the language-processing areas that handle isolated data points.

This is why the Pew survey's most memorable findings are not the percentages. They are the Indonesian respondents talking about spices, or the Australian describing mateship as something learned at school and lived through sport. The number tells you something happened. The story tells you what it meant.

For anyone communicating ideas, whether in a presentation, a proposal, a newsletter, or a conversation: the statistic earns attention but the story earns memory. The most persuasive communicators do not choose between data and narrative. They use data to establish credibility and story to make it stick.

The practical test is simple: if someone were to describe your communication to a friend the following day, what would they say? If the answer is a number, you have data. If the answer is a scene, you have something that will last.

Until next week,

Astrid Groenewegen

Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.