Cultural intelligence becomes business survival in a split world

cultural intelligence – A business anthropologist says culture is no longer one track—it’s splitting into opposing camps where attention, symbolism, and agency drive what people buy. His new book argues that companies and governments that learn these cultural rules, rather than assum

When Oliver Sweet talks about culture, he doesn’t start with branding or slogans. He starts with how people actually live—together, under invisible rules—and what happens when those rules stop lining up in the usual way.

Sweet, a business anthropologist and head of ethnography at Ipsos, advises companies and governments on how to become culturally relevant. In his new book. *The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act. Think. Believe. and Buy*. he lays out five insights meant to help readers understand the forces shaping behavior. belief. and buying.

Culture is our shared way of living. We interact with one another based on cultural rules. If we want to understand ourselves better, Sweet says, we need to understand the culture we live in.

The first shift he points to is structural: culture is no longer linear; it is divergent.

Sweet describes how. when he started studying culture 20 years ago. mainstream trends seemed able to pull smaller subcultures into a single storyline. He used examples from popular culture—he says “Oasis used to give two fingers to the man. and now they are multimillionaires. ” and that “The Simpsons used to be ironic and shocking. but now they are part of the wallpaper.”.

In his view, the pattern has broken. Culture now “seems to thrive on being in opposition.” He names the kinds of oppositions that shape what spreads:

Political divides, like the Republicans and Democrats.
Gender divides, like hyper-masculine role models as well as gender non-binary.
Influencers, like Joe Rogan and Bad Bunny.

Across these fractures, Sweet says the edges are thriving while the center ground of mainstream culture is retreating. He describes how. in many democratic countries. narratives that emphasize “the difference between the haves and have-nots. ” “the country is broken. ” and “normal people are being left behind” have gained traction. In those stories. the promise that dominant culture once offered—a social contract based on hard work creating rewards—no longer feels true. so people look elsewhere for answers.

That fragmentation, he argues, makes culture feel tense and full of arguments. But the real fight isn’t about “who wins the battle for right and wrong.” It’s about “who wins the battle for attention.”

The second insight takes a longer historical lens and lands on something that feels uncomfortably familiar in everyday life: we live in a symbolic society.

Sweet contrasts oral societies before 1800—where stories passed peer-to-peer around a campfire—and literate society after 1800. when printing presses. higher literacy. and wider distribution of newspapers and books changed how stories were built. In literate culture. he says. being right became more important than being memorable. and logic and rationality became the measure of believability.

Now, he argues, society is adopting the traits of an oral world again. News and stories are passed peer-to-peer “often at high speed,” and stories need to be memorable. He gives examples of slogans designed for recall: “Make America great again,” “take back control,” and “stop the boats.”

He also points to symbolism in politics—“a picture of a politician in a pub or having a burger” that, in his telling, can be more powerful than a leader delivering a speech from behind a lectern. Even as the world becomes more literate, he says information increasingly travels in symbolic form.

The third insight shifts the focus again, from systems to people who move toward uncertainty: era of agency.

Sweet frames it as the center of culture retreating after broken promises. When the system lets people down, he says, agency becomes the new character trait—something people seek by following figures at the fringes who promise a different way of life.

He cites populist leaders such as Marine Le Pen. Nigel Farage. and Donald Trump as examples of a new way of doing politics. with Sweet singling out Trump as “most successfully” populist. He connects other personalities to other kinds of promises: Andrew Tate. who he says has offered young men a new way to get rich and dominate women through his messages on the manosphere; and Greta Thunberg. who he says offered people a new way forward on climate change.

Beyond famous names, Sweet describes an entire ecosystem of influencers in beauty, wellness, technology, and sports—people follow them because they want to believe they can “hack a broken system.”

Then comes the fourth insight, which is where the future starts to feel personal: we will enter a world of digital narcissism.

Sweet points to an ongoing AI arms race to develop the Personal AI: a subscription-based AI that will learn about someone so it can “act like us.” He describes what that might mean in practical terms—ordering food. managing a calendar. suggesting a holiday—and then adds the economic twist of a capitalist system: suggesting what you should buy.

Because AI is designed to learn about us in order to be us. Sweet says. it will show people versions of the world they’re likely to like while hiding what they don’t. Over time. he imagines targeted advertisements filled with people who look like you. sound like you. and encourage you to buy products “the day after payday.”.

He argues the result is a “sycophantic mirror of us,” a world people will end up loving because it flatters them.

That’s not a purely theoretical worry for Sweet. He says it has already started with social media. In 2024, he conducted a study examining young people’s social media habits. He says the young people he interviewed spent three to four hours a day on social media. which he equates to looking at about 700 posts per day. When asked how many posts from the day before they remembered, Sweet says they recalled about five or six posts.

He connects the gap to cognitive psychology. saying it only takes about two seconds to register something you’ve seen—and then asks what happened to the other 695 posts. He also ties social scrolling to “everyone lives in an algorithmic echo chamber. ” arguing that scrolling on social media is basically equivalent to subliminal messaging on a mass scale.

In that framework, digital narcissism becomes another moment when cognition gets rewired, and people start to expect everything to have an AI lens applied to it that aims to please them.

The final insight is where Sweet’s anthropology is meant to become usable, even outside corporate strategy rooms: cultural insight for everyone.

He says the changes he describes are starting to rewire human cognition, and his closing insight is a “gift for understanding the world.” Across the book runs a framework called the Cultural Trinity.

Sweet defines it through three elements:

Identity — Who do you want to be? Who do you want people to think you are?
Community — What does everyone get up to when you all meet up? What do you drink, eat, and discuss?
Beliefs — What do you think is right and wrong? Good and evil?

He says if you identify these in friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, you can understand people’s cultural viewpoints in new and accessible ways. He adds that it helps show similarities and differences across cultural groups, and helps people see the world “a bit more like an anthropologist.”

This piece originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission. Sweet’s comments are also available as an audio Book Bite—read by Oliver himself—in the Next Big Idea app.

The through-line in Sweet’s five insights is stark: if culture splinters. attention becomes the currency. symbolism travels faster than speeches. agency pulls people toward new “characters. ” and algorithms turn personal preferences into daily reinforcement. For businesses and policymakers trying to connect. the challenge isn’t simply to communicate—it’s to understand the rules people are already living by.

cultural intelligence business anthropology Ipsos ethnography culture and society AI personalization digital narcissism social media Cultural Trinity identity community beliefs