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Research on How Culture Molds Habits of Thought
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D Chan
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Aug 23, 2005 14:17 PDT
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Hello,
Thought these interesting articles might provoke some discussion on
ministering to Asians...
Asians, Americans take different view of world
www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-23 11:09:20
BEIJING, Aug. 23 -- American students spent longer looking at the
tiger, while the Chinese students' eyes tended to dart around, taking in
the context.
American students spent longer looking at the tiger, while the Chinese
students' eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.£¨Photo:
tiger - qingdaonews£©
Chinese and American people see the world differently ¨C literally.
While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese
individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to
psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.
"There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and
East Asian people have contrasting world-views," explains Richard
Nisbett, who carried out the study. "Americans break things down
analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working
out what rules they should obey," he says.
By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at
objects in relation to the whole. "Figuratively, Americans see things in
black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey," says
Nisbett. "We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to
a literal difference in what they actually see."
The researchers tracked the eye-movements of two groups of students
while they looked at photographs. One group contained American-born
graduates of European descent and the other was comprised of
Chinese-born graduate students who came to the US after their
undergraduate degrees.
Each picture showed a striking central image placed in a realistic
background, such as a tiger in a jungle. They found that the American
students spent longer looking at the central object, while the Chinese
students' eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.
Harmony versus goals
Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has
developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. "Harmony is
a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis
on how things relate to the whole," says Nisbett. "In the West, by
contrast, life is about achieving goals."
Psychologists watching American and Japanese families playing with
toys have also noted this difference. "An American mother will say:
'Look Billy, a truck. It's shiny and has wheels.' The focus is on the
object," explains Nisbett. By contrast, Japanese mothers stress context
saying things like, "I push the truck to you and you push it to me. When
you throw it at the wall, the wall says 'ouch'."
Nisbett also cites language development in the cultures. "To
Westerners it seems obvious that babies learn nouns morys. But while
this is the case in the West, studies show that Korean and Chinese
children pick up verbs ¨C which relate objects to each other - more
easily.
"Nisbett's work is interesting and suggestive," says John Findlay, a
psychologist specialising in human visual attention at Durham
University, UK. "It's always difficult to put an objective measure on
cultural differences, but this group have made a step towards that."
Nisbett hopes that his work will change the way the cultures view
each other. "Understanding that there is a real difference in the way
people think should form the basis of respect."
(Source: CRIENGLISH.com/New Scientist)
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Related Article:
How Culture Molds Habits of Thought
For more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have
based their discussions of mental life on a cardinal assumption: that
the same basic processes underlie all human thought, whether in the
mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of the Serengeti.
Cultural differences might dictate what people thought about. Teenage
boys in Botswana, for example, might discuss cows with the same passion
that New York teenagers reserved for sports cars.
But the habits of thought -- the strategies people adopted in processing
information and making sense of the world around them -- were, Western
scholars assumed, the same for everyone, exemplified by, among other
things, a devotion to logical reasoning, a penchant for categorization
and an urge to understand situations and events in linear terms of cause
and effect.
Recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan,
however, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside
down..
In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East Asians, Dr.
Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in
different cultures do not just think about different things: they think
differently.
"We used to think that everybody uses categories in the same way, that
logic plays the same kind of role for everyone in the understanding of
everyday life, that memory, perception, rule application and so on are
the same," Dr. Nisbett said. "But we're now arguing that cognitive
processes themselves are just far more malleable than mainstream
psychology assumed."
A summary of the research will be published next winter in the journal
Psychological Review, and Dr. Nisbett discussed the findings Sunday at
the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in
Washington.
In many respects, the cultural disparities the researchers describe
mirror those described by anthropologists, and may seem less than
surprising to Americans who have lived in Asia. And Dr. Nisbett and his
colleagues are not the first psychological researchers to propose that
thought may be embedded in cultural assumptions: Soviet psychologists of
the 1930's posed logic problems to Uzbek peasants, arguing that
intellectual tools were influenced by pragmatic circumstances.
But the new work is stirring interest in academic circles because it
tries to define and elaborate on cultural differences through a series
of tightly controlled laboratory experiments. And the theory underlying
the research challenges much of what has been considered gospel in
cognitive psychology for the last 40 years.
"If it's true, it turns on its head a great deal of the science that
many of us have been doing, and so it's sort of scary and thrilling at
the same time," said Dr. Susan Andersen, a professor of psychology at
New York University and an associate editor at Psychological Review.
In the broadest sense, the studies -- carried out in the United States,
Japan, China and Korea -- document a familiar division. Easterners, the
researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater
attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based
knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for
contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending
to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to
rely more heavily on formal logic.
In one study, for example, by Dr. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, a
graduate student at Michigan, students from Japan and the United States
were shown an animated underwater scene, in which one larger "focal"
fish swam among smaller fishes and other aquatic life.
Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more
likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, "There was a
lake or pond" or "The bottom was rocky," or "The water was green."
Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the
largest fish, making statements like "There was what looked like a trout
swimming to the right."
Over all, Japanese subjects in the study made 70 percent more statements
about aspects of the background environment than Americans, and twice as
many statements about the relationships between animate and inanimate
objects. A Japanese subject might note, for example, that "The big fish
swam past the gray seaweed."
"Americans were much more likely to zero in on the biggest fish, the
brightest object, the fish moving the fastest," Dr. Nisbett said.
"That's where the money is as far as they're concerned."
But the greater attention paid by East Asians to context and
relationship was more than just superficial, the researchers found.
Shown the same larger fish swimming against a different, novel
background, Japanese participants had more difficulty recognizing it
than Americans, indicating that their perception was intimately bound
with their perception of the background scene.
When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the Asians
seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker than the Americans to
detect when people's behavior was determined by situational pressures.
Psychologists have long documented what they call the fundamental
attribution error, the tendency for people to explain human behavior in
terms of the traits of individual actors, even when powerful situational
forces are at work. Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech
endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example, most people
will still believe that the speaker believes what he is saying.
Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may in some
situations be less susceptible to such errors, indicating that they do
not describe a universal way of thinking, but merely the way that
Americans think.
In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Incheol Choi, of Seoul National
University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read
an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic
tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had
been given "no choice" about what to write.
But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to "err,"
judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the
essays.
When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar
experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they
quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay
writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that
the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs.
One of the most striking dissimilarities found by the researchers
emerged in the way East Asians and Americans in the studies responded to
contradiction. Presented with weaker arguments running contrary to their
own, Americans were likely to solidify their opinions, Dr. Nisbett said,
"clobbering the weaker arguments," and resolving the threatened
contradiction in their own minds. Asians, however, were more likely to
modify their own position, acknowledging that even the weaker arguments
had some merit.
In one study, for example, Asian and American subjects were presented
with strong arguments in favor of financing a research project on
adoption. A second group was presented both with strong arguments in
support of the project and weaker arguments opposing it.
Both Asian and American subjects in the first group expressed strong
support for the research. But while Asian subjects in the second group
responded to the weaker opposing arguments by decreasing their support,
American subjects actually increased their endorsement of the project in
response to the opposing arguments.
In a series of studies, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Kaiping Peng of the
University of California at Berkeley found that Chinese subjects were
less eager to resolve contradictions in a variety of situations than
American subjects. Asked to analyze a conflict between mothers and
daughters, American subjects quickly came down in favor of one side or
the other. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit on both sides,
commenting, for example, that, "Both the mothers and the daughters have
failed to understand each other."
Given a choice between two different types of philosophical argument,
one based on analytical logic, devoted to resolving contradiction, the
other on a dialectical approach, accepting of contradiction, Chinese
subjects preferred the dialectical approach, while Americans favored the
logical arguments. And Chinese subjects expressed more liking than
Americans for proverbs containing a contradiction, like the Chinese
saying "Too modest is half boastful." American subjects, Dr. Nisbett
said, found such contradictions "rather irritating."
Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan of the University of Illinois have
also found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in
conflict, Americans are more likely than Asians to adhere to the rules
of formal logic, in keeping with a tradition that in Western societies
began with the Ancient Greeks. For example, presented with a logical
sequence like, "All animals with fur hibernate. Rabbits have fur.
Therefore rabbits hibernate," the Americans, the researchers found, were
more likely to accept the validity of the argument, separating its
formal structure, that of a syllogism, from its content, which might or
might not be plausible. Asians, in contrast, more frequently judged such
syllogisms as invalid based on their implausibility -- not all animals
with fur do in fact hibernate.
While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are
substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence
suggests that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has
existed at least since ancient times, a tradition of adversarial debate,
formal logical argument and analytic deduction flowering in Greece,
while in China an appreciation for context and complexity, dialectical
argument and a tolerance for the "yin and yang" of life flourished.
How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social
and religious practices, different languages or even different geography
is anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages,
and both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the
genes: Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable
in their modes of thought from European-Americans.
Dr. Alan Fiske, an associate professor of anthropology at the University
of California at Los Angeles, said that experimental research like Dr.
Nisbett's "complements a lot of ethnographic work that has been done."
"Anthropologists have been describing these cultures and this can tell
you a lot about everyday life and the ways people talk and interact,"
Dr. Fiske said. "But it's always difficult to know how to make sense of
these qualitative judgments, and they aren't controlled in the same way
that an experiment is controlled."
Yet not everyone agrees that all the dissimilarities described by Dr.
Nesbitt and his colleagues reflect fundamental differences in
psychological process.
Dr. Patricia Cheng, for example, a professor of psychology at the
University of California at Los Angeles, said that many of the
researchers' findings meshed with her own experience. "Having grown up
in a traditional Chinese family and also being in Western culture
myself," she said, "I do see some entrenched habits of interpretation of
the world that are different across the cultures, and they do lead to
pervasive differences." But Dr. Cheng says she thinks that some
differences -- the Asian tolerance for contradiction, for example -- are
purely social. "There is not a difference in logical tolerance," she
said.
Still, to the extent that the studies reflect real differences in
thinking and perception, psychologists may have to radically revise
their ideas about what is universal and what is not, and to develop new
models of mental process that take cultural influences into account.
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