Culture & Point of View - Nisbett & Masuda PDF

Culture & Point of View - Nisbett & Masuda Ideas about the world and the cognitive processes used to understand were quite different for Ancient Greek & Chinese philosophers & scientists: Ancient Greeks Ancient Chi...

Culture & Point of View - Nisbett & Masuda Ideas about the world and the cognitive processes used to understand were quite different for Ancient Greek & Chinese philosophers & scientists: Ancient Greeks Ancient Chinese More analytical thinking, formalized logic and used it for many More holistic thinking, they see actions as occurring in a cognitive operations. field of forces. Logic is not formalized and somewhat Attention is focused on salient objects and their behavior was explain neglected. on the basis of their inherent properties & the categories to which they Attention is focused on the field around salient objects. belonged. Relationships between objects in the field are more Matter was seen as composed of discrete atoms. relevant than specific object properties & categories. Saw stability in the world (e.g. in Plato's ideas). More rules about Matter was seen as continuous interpenetrating objects brings a higher sense of control. substances. Emphasized constant change in the world. These differences might have resulted from the differing social life of the 2 societies, which made it natural for them to process the world in the ways they did: Chinese were more socially interdependent and trying to maximize social harmony, while coordinating their actions with others. They perceived themselves as interdependent parts of a larger social context, which might influence their perception of other objects or events. The Greeks were relatively independent, having fewer & less complex social relationships than the Chinese. They valued individualism and autonomy. This might have given them the luxury of attending to objects in light of personal goals and seeing objects (physical & social) as distinct & separate. Current social practices of East and West differ in ways similar to ancient times, which leads to the prediction that modern East Asians reason differently from modern Westeners. The Western self is composed of fixed attributes and can move from 1 setting to another without significant alteration. The Eastern self is so connected to others that the self is literally dependent on the context - if an important person is removed from an individual's social network, that individual literally becomes a different person. When asked to describe the self, Americans & Canadians tend to tell about their personality & attitudes more than Japanese. They also overestimate their distinctiveness and prefer uniqueness in themselves and their possessions. The independent/interdependent distinction begins early in life. Western babies commonly sleep in different beds/rooms from their parents. This is rare for Asian babies. When American mothers play with their children, they focus their attention on objects and their attributes ("see the truck; i t has nice wheels"), whereas Japanese mothers emphasize feelings & relationships ("when you throw your truck, the wall says 'ouch'") Cognitive differences Causal attribution and prediction Westeners tend to explain events with properties of the object and East Asians tend to explain the same events with interactions between the object and the field. Americans tend to explain murders & sport events by invoking presumed traits & abilities of the individual, while Chinese citizens are more likely to explain the same events with reference to contextual factors (including historical ones). East Asians use more contextual information than Americans when making casual attributions and predictions. Explanations also differ for inanimate objects and animals. For ambiguous physical phenomena, Chinese are more likely than Americans to refer to the field when giving explanations. Logic vs. dialectics Typicality effect - typical members of a category are more likely to be judged as members of the category than non-typical members. When told that all birds have a certain property, people are more inclined to agree that eagles have that property than that penguins have that property. Korean participants are more likely than Americans to be susceptible to this effect. Chinese are more comfortable with apparent contradictions than Americans. Chinese participants had a greater preference for proverbs that contain an apparent contradiction (e.g. "too humble is half proud"). Chinese were more likely to propose a "middle way" solution to inter- and intrapersonal conflicts than Americans, who find it necessary that one side had to be correct. When presented with evidence for apparently contradictory propositions, Chinese participants tried to find truth in both, whereas Complex Cognition Page 1  When presented with evidence for apparently contradictory propositions, Chinese participants tried to find truth in both, whereas Americans were more inclined to reject one proposition in favor of the other. Categorization East Asians classify objects & events on the basis of relationships and family resemblance, whereas Americans classify on the basis of rule-based category membership. Study: triplets of objects are shown to Chinese & American children and they are asked to say which of the 2 objects went together. American children put the chicken and the cow together because 'both are animals' Chinese children put the cow and the grass together because 'the cow eats the grass' This tendency was also found in college students given triplets of words to read. Study: participants are asked to report if a target object was more similar to the objects in 1 of 2 groups. The target object bears a strong family resemblance to the group of objects on the left, but there is a rule that allows placing the object in the group on the right, namely, ‘‘has a straight stem.’’ East Asians reported that the object was more similar to the group with which it shared a family resemblance, whereas European Americans were more likely to regard the object as similar to the group to which it could be assigned by application of the rule. Asian Americans, although closer to East Asians, showed no overall preference. Attention & Perception Differences Detection of covariation East Asians are better than Westeners at detecting relationships between events. Study: arbitrary objects are presented to Chinese & Americans (see figure). One of the objects on the left appeared on the left side of a split computer screen followed rapidly by one of the objects on the right appearing on the right side of the screen. The participant needs to judge the strength of the relationship between 1 object appearing on the left and a corresponding object appearing on the right. The Chinese participants saw more covariation than Americans, were more confident about their judgments and their judgments were better correlated with the actual degree of covariation. Field dependence Complex Cognition Page 2 Field dependence Field dependence - difficulty in separating an object and the field in which it appears. Rod and frame test - the participant looks down a long box at the end of which is a rod whose orientation can be changed, and a frame around the rod can be moved independently. The participant needs to judge if the rod is vertical. Field dependence here is measured as the judgment of the participant being influenced by the orientation of the frame. Chinese participants are more influenced by the position of the frame than American participants. Attention to the field Study: a 20-second animated video of underwater scenes with salient objects (e.g. moving fish) are presented to Japanese & American participants. After seeing each video twice, participants are asked to report what they had seen. American participants started their statements by mentioning salient objects far more frequently than Japanese participants. Japanese made 65% more observations about the field than Americans. They mentioned twice as many relations between objects and the field. After seeing 10 videos, participants are presented with photos of 45 objects that they had seen before and 45 that they had not seen. The 45 previously seen objects were shown against the original background, no background, or a new background. American performance was unaffected by background manipulation. The Japanese made many more errors when the object was presented against a novel background. Their performance was better for the no-background condition, but not worse for the no-background condition than for the original background condition. Change blindness Change blindness - when a picture of a scene and a somewhat altered version of it are presented sequentially, with just a brief pause in between, people can find it very difficult to detect changes that are completely obvious when the two versions are shown side-by-side. Study: Japanese & Americans participants are shown 2 versions of the same scene that had changes in both salient foreground objects as well as in relationships between objects and less salient background objects. The participants are asked to tell which aspects of the scene had changed from the first version of the scene to the second. American participants were more likely to detect changes in salient objects. Japanese participants were more likely to detect relationship & context changes. Affordances in the environment Affordances - environmental factors that contribute to people's habitual patterns of attention and perception. Study: scenes in Japanese and Americans cities differ consistently in average number of objects (32% greater number in Japanese scenes than in American scenes). Japanese scenes also have more ambiguous boundaries for objects. Affordances in the different environments (American / East Asian) themselves have an effect on the perceptions of both American and Japanese. In the above study, if the scenes were intended to resemble American environments, both Americans and Japanese found it easier to detect object changes than field changes. The opposite effects occurred for Japanese environments. Esthetics East and West When college students are asked to draw a landscape showing at least a house, a tree, a person, a river and a horizon, East Asian participants placed the horizon higher and drew more objects overall than American participants. When Japanese and American students were asked to take a photo of a person, the Japanese photos showed the person as small relative to the field. Change vs. stability Complex Cognition Page 3 Change vs. stability If one is attending primarily to a focal object and its properties, and assigning it to a static category, the world may appear to be stable. But if one is attending to a greater number of objects and their relationships, the world may appear to be in a constant state of change. Study: several current states (e.g. a relationship between 2 young people) are described and participants are asked if the state would remain the same or change in the future. For all events, more Chinese than American participants thought the future would be different from the past. Study: participants are presented with alleged recent trends in various parameters (e.g. global economy growth rates). They were asked to make a prediction as to what the next change will be. For all types of Curves, Chinese participants were more likely to predict that the next change will stop or reverse the direction of change. Chinese participants tend more often than Americans to predict reversals of trends. Perception of everyday life events Study: American and Taiwanese college students are asked to describe some personal events, to read some narratives and then summarize them, and to watch videos of silent comedies and summarize them. Americans made more mentions of the central character, more statements expressing control over a situation or a desire to achieve control. Taiwanese made more comments about the emotional states of various characters. Discussion The East/West cognitive differences might arise from perceptual & attentional differences. The cognitive, perceptual & attentional differences might have arisen from the complex societal structures East Asians had since ancient times, due to their agricultural lifestyle requiring collaboration & hierarchies. Such an emphasis on social concerns might have sustained itself partly out of sheer inertia. It's unknown why the affordances in built Eastern and Western environments differ. Research shows that the reason is not higher population density in Eastern environments. The greater complexity of the Eastern environments can be explained by the esthetic preferences of Easteners, who focus on the field and attend a large number of elements. Westeners focus more narrowly on a smaller number of elements and prefer environments with fewer elements. These difference might intensify each other: the environments influence perception and the resulting perceptual preferences prompt people to produce different environments. Complex Cognition Page 4