8 Egos at work

Dr. Miguel A. Cerna is a behavioral scientist and cross-cultural conflict analyst. He moved from El Salvador to Taiwan in 1995 and to Mainland China in 2010, where he conducted his doctoral research in Organizational Cross-Cultural Conflict Management.

As a child, he used to spend long hours daily observing people, and thinking about the reasons behind their facial expressions and body movements. Later, with the intention to find out where behavior comes from, he first looked into psychology, where he discovered the influence of emotions and society on behavior, which brought him to cognitive behavioral and social psychology.

In his early adulthood, he traveled extensively to thirty countries and interacted professionally and socially with people from over eighty cultures. This exposure educated him on his incorporation of culture into the formula of human behavior.

In the process of becoming a multicultural person himself and a polyglot, he witnessed how people from different cultures speak of and use money, and how the possession or lack of it influences behavior, which brought him to his writings on behavioral economics. He later dived into the neurology of behavior. Together, these areas of knowledge greatly contributed to finding out the root cause of behavior, to which he has dedicated his life.

By the publication date of this handbook, he is Managing Partner at Verve and lives in Portugal, where he was displaced due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Unable to return to his home country, he’s used this time to write and publish on different subjects including human behavior and globalization as well as deepen his involvement in the development of systems for human communication.