Some interpersonal skills are universal, but others are very much cultural dependent.
Therefore, there may be a case to tag questions by region. Where that is not enough, by anything else that forms a specific culture, such as by class or by subculture. I've tagged my question europe but that may not be specific enough in the long term, as Europe is large and diverse. It's intended as a start.
Should we tag our questions by (cultural) region?
Oh my goodness yes!
Social skills and norms, traditions, values... etc vary so much depending on where you are and the culture of that region. Pakistani social norms will be different from Canadian norms, which themselves will be different from those of South Africa.
At the very least, we should push people asking questions to provide regional or cultural context in the body of the question. I don't see a problem with tagging it, too. If the community feels the answer doesn't actually depend on that, we still have the option to remove a tag if it was applied, but it's much harder to get the information if it wasn't provided from the start. So let's cultivate a culture of "tell us where you are".
And anyway, how can we expect anybody, OP or otherwise, to know up front if a situation is culture/location-specific or universal? I suspect that very few things are universal -- I think all of the "don't tag" examples in this answer could be region-dependent in some regions. Workplace petty theft, putting feet up on things (particularly if the it makes the soles visible), and interactions with low-level service people do vary.
More information is better than less. If the answers are different for Pakistan, Louisiana, and New Zealand, then we have three questions that are similar on the surface but fundamentally different, each of which can get targeted answers. That sounds like a win to me.
Besides, aren't we all sick of the US-centrism on most of the Internet? If somebody answers a question about Italy from a US-specific perspective, that's not an answer, but if everybody's guessing then it might be. Let's try to make context more obvious. Relatedly, we should try to be careful to declare our context when answering location-agnostic questions, to help future readers evaluate answers with respect to their own situations.
Tagging too many questions will discourage people from posting who are from outside a region/culture. We should tag questions by culture if it seems like the culture is especially relevant, but not as a default recommendation.
Examples of where we should tag:
Examples of where we should not tag:
This great question was regional based, and the OP placed the usa tag, which I had removed and then replaced with united-states after realizing that, yes, there are questions that are indeed regional-based.
Perhaps we should wait and see.
Whereas it appears that tagging by cultural region makes immediate sense (it did for me), I thought about it and concluded that it would be almost impossible to make it work.
You could say USA. But then how many cultural standards are there within the USA. One may effectively answer many. So where does it stop. We could conceivable get down to Little Italy in New York City.
You could say "the South" in the USA. But does that apply to Hispanic people in Miami, or the residents of the Bible Belt.
Additionally, I would rather like to hear the response from a native of India (just as an example) as they answer a question where the asker has the USA in mind. I may have plans to travel there, and may get great value from their input. But putting a tag on question will definitely discourage that. (Also, the same type of issue may exist in India, and others from India may find it beneficial.)
In short, this would be very challenging to make it work. Perhaps we should wait and see.
We're in 2017. We live in a globalized world where everyone wears the same jeans and t-shirts, and there are "Indian" and "Chinese" restaurants all around here in Europe.
Sure cultural differences still exist but they're subtle and slimmer as they've never been in human history and getting even slimmer by the minute. People are much more different to each other by their personality than by their nationality. Adding each 190 U.N. country as a tag and forcing users using one of them on every question is, in my opinion, stupid.
Even worse is the fact that some U.N. countries, including both large countries such as India and small countries such as Switzerland, have major cultural gaps within them.
The biggest cultural difference in my opinion is between urban people (more globalized and open to new ideas) and rural people (more connected to traditional ways of living). It's hard to explain exactly in english, but based on my own personal experience, the cultural gap between Geneva, Switzerland and London, UK or Berlin, Germany will be very minor as all those places are globalized, highly connected dynamic cities - on the other hand the cultural gap between the lower half of Montreux - Switzerland which is a city and its upper half which are rural mountains is huge despite being in the same municipality.
As such, providing a country in which a certain situation happens does not necessarly help to give answers. People's culture vary not only from which U.N. state they're in but also depending on their religion, and rural/urban context, and in the end people are different to each other anyway.
In cases of small countries, such as Switzerland, potential answerers from other parts of the world might come with valid answers but be reluctant to give them because they have no idea what the so called "culture" is like here - but who cares, ideas from other parts of the world can still be valuable here.
However having some tags about wide cultural areas such as "western world", "muslim world", "india" and have them being recommended, instead of obligatory for every question, would make much more sense.
