Episode 78
Moon Joy and Cultural Intelligence
In this solo episode, Trisha explores what happens when astronauts return from space transformed by what they've seen — and whether Cultural Intelligence (CQ) might help us experience something similar without leaving Earth.
What can the Artemis II crew's awe and perspective shifts teach us about seeing ourselves as one crew on a fragile lifeboat? How does the overview effect connect to figure-ground shifts in cultural intelligence work? And if we're wired to see each other as "us" and "them," can CQ help us cultivate a different way of seeing — one where our shared humanity becomes the figure against the vast ground of space?
Trisha reflects on concepts introduced by CQ researchers Kok-Yee Ng and Thomas Rockstuhl, connecting astronaut insights to practical CQ applications. She leaves listeners with a question to sit with until next week's continuation of this thread.
Resources mentioned:
Ng, K. Y., Ang, S., & Rockstuhl, T. (2022). Cultural intelligence: From intelligence in context and across cultures to intercultural contexts. In R. J. Sternberg & D. D. Preiss (Eds.), Intelligence in context: The cultural and historical foundations of human intelligence (pp. 177–200). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92798-1_8
White, F. (2014). The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. AIAA.
NASA photo library: https://images.nasa.gov/
Referenced in this episode: Episodes 76 and 77: Dr. David Livermore on the Prism framework Episode 8: Dr. Mark Williams - Shifts and the Brain
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Transcript
I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.
Trisha:Welcome everyone to episode 78 of the Shift. My name is Trisha Carter. I'm an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. For those of you who may be joining us for the first time in this podcast, we look at those moments of awareness, the shifts in our thinking that help us to see a different perspective, to see each other's perspectives, especially when it comes to cultural perspectives.
Trisha:Cultural intelligence sometimes referred to a cq, for those of you who may not have heard about it before, is the capability to operate effectively in situations of diversity. There are four parts to it. Cq drive the motivation. You need to want to step into those different situations. CQ knowledge. You need to know some things about different cultures or different people, how things are similar or different.
Trisha:CQ strategy. You need to be able to think about your thinking about cultures and CQ action where our behaviors and actions might need to shift because we've stepped into a different environment. So the shifts in our perspectives that we talk about here become a really important part of building CQ strategy.
Trisha:A really important part of cultural intelligence. Today's podcast, dear listeners, is just you and me. I've had a few weeks away from publishing episodes 'cause I went home to New Zealand to be with family, to celebrate together, to care for family, and to feel that connection to place. And I did catch up with one of my CQ fellows colleagues, and that was great as well.
Trisha:But it was a bit of a tough time. While I was there, there was a cyclone, there were floods, numerous weather emergencies. So a shout out to all of those in Aotearoa New Zealand. I'm thinking of you and I hope recovery is progressing. I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of the shifts that you might have been experiencing this month.
Trisha:If you are listening in from some point in the future, I'm recording this on April the 26th, 2026. It has been a difficult time globally. There's a war in the Middle East. It's moving to shaky peace talks. There are fuel shortages, global tensions, and this underlying continuing uncertainty that so many of us have been sitting with.
Trisha:Really the cost in human terms. Of loss, of injury, and of fear and uncertainty has been high, but that isn't what I want to focus on today because the first few weeks of April also brought many of us something else entirely.
Trisha:Something that felt a bit like the world was breathing out and just experiencing some positive moments. There were some real shifts in terms of awe and wonder. So dear listeners, were you like me following Artemis two and her crew as they journeyed around the moon? Were you, like me listening to their joy and wonder and appreciating the openness they had, the, the willingness to just be in the experience they were all having.
Trisha:I listened to some of their comments. I read the news reports. I watched some of the videos, and over and over I heard them share their perspective shifts, talking about them in real time as they were, as they were experiencing them. Mission specialist, Christina Koch, on her departure for the moon said, with this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth. We choose it. And then reflecting on earth from deepened space, she said, what struck me isn't just Earth, it's all a blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging in the universe. That stopped me because it really is what psychologists think of as a figure ground shift moment. You might have heard of figure ground, and you might be familiar with those images.
Trisha:Maybe you even had them in CQ training or used them yourself. Or maybe you've experienced coaching questions that try and get you to see things from that figure ground perspective. So some of the images that you might've seen, there's the old woman and the young woman in the same picture together, or there's two faces that are looking at each other across a white space.
Trisha:And that white space is actually an hourglass that sits between them. And often we can see both images. But we can only really consciously hold one at a time. What's in the foreground becomes the figure and everything else becomes the ground. And that's what it sounded like to me that Christina was doing.
Trisha:She was holding the vast blackness of space as her ground, the context that it was sitting in, and then suddenly earth shifted for her into the foreground, not just beautiful. As she said, a lifeboat. And then after that she said, planet Earth, you are a crew. I mean, wow. Yes, moon, joy, everyone. And there were other moments.
Trisha:Victor Glover, the pilot, he had a similar situation. He described Earth as an oasis. Again, an oasis is that water that sits in the ground of sand of desert, a beautiful place earth, that oasis that we exist in together, and he reframed the crew's distance from earth, not as isolation, but as proof of earth's preciousness.
Trisha:You are on a spaceship called Earth. He said. And that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.
Trisha:And then there was this moment during the solar eclipse from Luna Space when Glover said, humans probably have not evolved to see what we are seeing. It is truly hard to describe, and Commander Wiseman echoed it. No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us.
Trisha:I found that really significant. They weren't just saying it's beautiful. They were recognizing the limits of their own perception, their existing mental models, if you like, the frameworks that they had for making sense of the world. Weren't sufficient to hold or process what they were experiencing. I think many of us who have lived and worked in other cultures have had a version of that feeling, that moment of, I have no idea what this is or what's going on here.
Trisha:I don't have a map for this experience. It's humbling. It can feel like, you know, you suddenly don't know what's going on. In the case of Artemis two, there was also a profound moment of awe, humility, and awe. Two things we don't always associate together in more corporate settings. When I was reading the news reports and listening to all of this, my mind kept going back to 2023.
Trisha:I was on a learning retreat in Singapore with the first cohort of CQ fellows. The OG CQ Fellows, it was led by David Livermore. Many of you will have heard him speak in the previous two episodes. I really encourage you to listen to those. During that time, we visited Nanyang Technical University, and we heard from some of the key researchers and cultural intelligence, including Kok-Yee Ng and Thomas Rockstuhl
Trisha:honestly, my inner nerd was genuinely in heaven. They were working on a paper that was later published in an edited volume on intelligence. It was one of the editors is Sternberg. Many of the psychologists will know about his work in intelligence. I'll put the full reference in the show notes. And honestly in this paper they were working on, there were some really complex ideas in it, but one of them hit me in a way that I remember.
Trisha:It was the idea that CQ could potentially contribute to a new way of thinking that could help us create what they referred to as an overview effect.
Trisha:In my hotel room in Singapore, I'd never heard that term before. So let me tell you what it means. The overview effect is a psychological concept that describes what happens when astronauts return from space and report a profound shift in how they see human relations. Ultimately, they experience the world's troubles as secondary to the earth as a whole.
Trisha:And often they talk about believing that even significant struggles can be resolved through a more holistic way of seeing the earth. It was named by Frank White after he interviewed astronauts and found this pattern again and again. The key thing is that it's not just wonder and I guess appreciation of beauty.
Trisha:It's a shift in how you perceive yourself in relation to everyone else. It's a shift from my group and other groups to we are one thing in one place facing this together. So when earlier in April, I heard the Artemis two crew doing exactly what that concept describes. I was taken back and thought about that paper and the ideas that the researchers were proposing.
Trisha:So some of those comments again, there was Victor Glover on Easter Sunday. He said, trust us, you look amazing. You look beautiful. And from up here you also look like one thing. No matter where you're from or what you look like, we're all one people.
Trisha:He said, as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we've got to get through this together. That my friends, is the overview effect right there.
Trisha:So this is where I want to sit with you for a moment because a question that's been with me since Singapore is, can we use CQ to cultivate this in the way the researchers were suggesting? Can we help ourselves and others develop the capacity to perceive other humans across cultural difference, not as threats or obstacles?
Trisha:But as co inhabitants of the same fragile system as the astronauts did. We know from social identity theory that we are primed to see each other as us and them. It's sometimes called the tribe's effect.
Trisha:And we even spoke about it way back in episode eight with Dr. Mark Williams, the neuroscientists. So you can go back and have a listen to that episode where he's speaking about, the way our brain processes faces when it sees them. The tribes effect. We evolve to categorize quickly. To identify our group and to be on the alert to those who are outside of our group in times of conflict, and we are certainly in a time of conflict.
Trisha:We can see how that tendency gets activated and how it gets deliberately encouraged by some who will benefit from that tendency. So can we change this without mission control and a lunar trajectory? I think we can, but there's something I want to be careful about here because there's a concept that can sound a lot like the overview effect, but it actually pulls us in a different direction.
Trisha:And we've experienced some of that here in Australia yesterday. But I want to unpack that with you next week because it's another concept and perhaps. A little confusing to combine the two of them. For now, I want to leave you with one question to sit with. If you could look back at our world the way Christina Koch looked at Earth as a figure against a vast and dark ground, what might shift for you?
Trisha:Who would become the crew?
Trisha:If you aren't already following or subscribed to this podcast, please do so so that you don't miss next week when we pick this thread back up and go further into the discussion. And if you'd like to experience a little bit of moon joy for yourself. You could maybe generate your own small overview effect.
Trisha:We'll include in the show notes a link to the NASA photo library and some of the extraordinary images from this mission, as well as earlier pictures, including the Earthrise picture, which is one of the ones that began this whole process. You can see and reflect on this lifeboat that we are all on together.
Trisha:Thank you for being here with me on The Shift.
