Amazing how our perception of reality is so shaped by our upbringing and environment and not on the actual reality.
Scholars like Shinobu Kitayama of Kyoto University, Hazel Markus of Stanford, and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan have spent years studying the different ways Asians and Westerners think and perceive. The core lesson of Nisbett’s work is contained in a famous experiment in which he showed pictures of a fish tank to Americans and Japanese, and asked them to describe what they saw. In case after case, the Americans described the biggest and most prominent fish in the tank. The Japanese made 60 percent more references to the context and background elements of the scene, like the water, rocks, bubbles, and plants in the tank. Nisbett’s conclusion is that, on the whole, Westerners tend to focus narrowly on individuals taking actions, while Asians are more likely to focus on contexts and relationships. His argument is that since at least the time of classical Greece, Western thought has emphasized individual action, permanent character traits, formal logic, and clearly delineated categories. For an even longer period, Asian thought has emphasized context, relationships, harmony, paradox, interdependence, and radiating influences. “Thus, to the Asian,” Nisbett writes, “the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than personal con- trol.”
This is a wide generalization obviously, but Nisbett and many other researchers have fleshed it out with compelling experimental results and observations. English-speaking parents emphasize nouns and categories when talking with their children. Korean parents emphasize verbs and relationships. Asked to describe video clips of a complex airport scene, Japanese students pick out many more background details than American students. When shown a picture of a chicken, a cow, and some grass and asked to categorize the objects, American students generally lump the chicken and the cow be- cause they are both animals. Chinese students are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass, and so have a relationship with it. When asked to describe their day, American six-year-olds make three times more references to themselves than Chinese six-year-olds. The experiments in this line of research are diverse. When presented with a dialogue of a mother and daughter arguing, American subjects were likely to pick a side, either the mother or daughter, and describe who was right. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit in both positions. When asked about themselves, Americans tend to exaggerate ways in which they are different and better than the crowd, while Asians exaggerate the traits they have in common and the ways they are interdependent. When asked to choose between three computers—one of which had more memory, one of which had a faster processor, and one of which was in the middle on both—American consumers tend to decide which trait they value most and then choose the computer with the highest performance on that trait. Chinese consumers tend to choose the middle computer, which has a mid- ranking on both traits. Nisbett has found that Chinese and Americans use different scanning patterns to see the world. When looking at something like the Mona Lisa, Americans tend to spend more time looking at her face. The Chinese eyes perform more saccades, jerky eye movements, between the focal object and the background objects. This gives them a more holistic sense of the scene.
[The Social Animal - A Story Of How Success Happens page 199-200]
