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.

By ERICA GOODE
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
"http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/080800hth-behavior-c
ulture.html"

janet paterson
53 now / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd
tel: 613 256 8340 url: "http://www.geocities.com/janet313/"
email: [log in to unmask] smail: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada