East Versus West: One Sees Big Picture, Other Is Focud
孕妇可以吃柿子不March 28, 2003
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By SHARON BEGLEY
Copyright The Wall Street Journal
East Versus West: One Sees Big Picture, Other Is Focud
You ask two new acquaintances to tell you about themlves. The Japane gent describes himlf as "outgoing with his family," "competitive on the soccer field" and "rious at work."杂乱的反义词 The Briton doesn't par it so finely, saying he is "friendly, intellectual and goal-driven."
Then you ask each to decide which two -- of a panda, a monkey and a banana -- go together. The Japane man lects the monkey and the banana; the Brit, the panda
and the monkey.
Like many scholars of human thought since at least Hume and Locke, today's cognitive psychologists tend to be "universalists," assuming that 铲怎么读everyone perceives, thinks and reasons the same way.
"There has long been a widespread belief among philosophers and, later, cognitive scientists that thinking the world over is basically the same," says psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Although there have always been disnters, the prevailing wisdom held that a Masai hunter, a corporate raider and a milkmaid all e, remember, infer and think the same way.
传统文化有哪些But an ever-growing number of studies challenge this assumption. "Human cognition is not everywhere the same," concludes psychologist Richard E. Nisbett of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in his new book, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why." Instead, he says, "the characteristic thought process of Asians and Westerners differ greatly.
"
The book compares people from East Asia (Korea, China and Japan) with Westerners (from Europe, the British commonwealth and North America).
平鱼怎么做AS THE MONKEY-PANDA example shows, Westerners typically e categories (animals) where Asians typically e relationships (monkeys eat bananas). Such differences in thinking can trip up business and political relationships.
The cognitive differences start with basic nsory perception. In one study, Michigan's Taka Masuda showed Japane and American students pictures of aquariums containing one big fast-moving fish, veral other finned swimmers, plants, rock and bubbles. What did the students recall? The Japane spontaneously remembered 60% more background elements than did the Americans. They also referred twice as often to relationships involving background objects ("the little frog was above the pink rock").
The difference was even more striking when the participants were asked which, of 96 objects, had been in the scene. When the test object was shown in the context of its original surroundings, the Japane did much better at remembering correctly whether they had en it before. For the Americans, including the background was no help; they had never even en it.
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"Westerners and Asians literally e different worlds," says Prof. Nisbett. "Westerners pay attention to the focal object, while Asians attend more broadly -- to the overall surroundings and to the relations between the object and the field." The generalizations em to hold even though Eastern and Western countries each reprent many different cultures and traditions.
Becau of their heightened perception of surroundings, East Asians attribute causality less to actors than to context. Little wonder, then, that West and East e North Korea's nuclear threats very differently. "Understanding how other people think and e the world is crucial in international disputes," says psychologist Robert Sternberg of Yale University in New Haven, Conn.
Divergent East-West thinking also has produced some ten business conflicts. In the 1970s, Japane refiners, having signed a contract to buy sugar from Australia for $160 a ton, asked to renegotiate after world prices dropped. The Aussies refud. To the Asians, changing circumstances dictated changes in agreements; to the Westerners, a deal was a deal.
One striking east-west difference centers on drawing inferences. Imagine a line graph plotting economic growth in which the rate of growth accelerates (that is, the line gets steeper to the right). Rearchers asked college students in Ann Arbor and Beijing whether they thought the growth rate would go up, go down, or stay the same. The Americans were more likely to predict a continued ri, extrapolating trends, than were the Chine, who saw trends as likely to rever.
Westerners prefer abstract universal principles; East Asians ek rules appropriate to a situation. For example, when rearchers in the Netherlands asked people what to do about an employee who work has been subpar for a year after 15 year
s of exemplary rvice, more than 75% of Americans and Canadians said to let her go; only 20% of Singaporeans and Koreans agreed.
