Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. But an ever-growing number of studies challenge this assumption. Americans are very kind to everyone they meet the first time. Monkey and banana! Similarly, bicultural people, like those in Hong Kong with its British and Chinese history, show thinking patterns intermediate between East and West. I would do just that: take a picture of them. are shifted somewhat toward Eastern patterns''). Because of their heightened perception of surroundings, East Asians attribute causality less to actors than to context. The Briton doesn't parse it so finely, saying he is "friendly, intellectual and goal-driven." ( Log Out / I matched the monkey with the banana and got really excited because clearly, I’m meant to be in Korea. Copyright The Wall Street Journal Apparently this discrepancy in thought can affect anything from settling disputes, recruiting new employees and even the way a mother talks to her baby. The Japanese spontaneously remembered 60% more background elements than did the Americans. In the Chinese world, politeness is part of a basic set of principles that has to be followed by all. When I’ve been thinking and talking with my Korean friends about cultural differences there are two particular experiments that I find I’m often pointed to. But anthropologists have learned the hard way that this kind of … Congrats ㅋㅋㅋ I thought a similar thing, that the middle guy was happy for the same reason that the background characters were sad. After all, they didn’t ask for a panoramic view of the area, just of themselves. Instead, he says, "the characteristic thought processes of Asians and Westerners differ greatly." I guess there’s value in both. I didn’t even realise that the people behind him weren’t smiling. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104881491132002400,00.html My wife, upon seeing the picture, wasn’t so sure. She concluded that even though the person in the middle is smiling, he cannot actually be happy since the people around him clearly aren’t. For the first one I chose monkey and banana and for the second picture I thought happy. But then I got to the happy/sad one, and while I knew the right answer based on the “me” vs. “us” mentality Ben mentioned, I genuinely believe the middle guy is happy and the rest are sad because he just beat them all at some kind of game. One way I can see this is in the way my wife and I take photos. That's a model that workplaces might do well to emulate, says Prof. Nisbett: The more cultural diversity and, hence, thinking styles in a workforce, the likelier it is to see problems clearly and solve them. Nisbett takes this to confirm the hypothesis that ''Asians view the world through a wide-angle lens, whereas Westerners have tunnel vision.'' It is in fact a question about the scientific validity of the enterprise. How much difference does there have to be between the Asians and the Westerners in a particular experiment to demonstrate a cultural divide? This time, look at the picture and decide what emotion the person in the centre is feeling. I really see the value in the “us” view and wish I acted more like it, but still end up thinking about “me”! But anthropologists have learned the hard way that this kind of exercise -- in which cultures are represented as deeply and homogeneously programmed with very different ways of thinking -- often has quite the opposite effect, fostering or feeding unproductive stereotypes (or worse). It’s really hard to see if otherwise! People from Western cultures on the other hand are more individualistic and use low context communication, meaning they use concrete language and direct communication to get their point across. Rather than just explaining it we should probably just go right ahead and try it out, right? This would seem to lend credibility to the hypothesis -- except that the French, Italians and Germans also weighed in at 30 percent. Yet every time internal differences are noted, we are quickly told that they ''shouldn't blind us to the fact that the East and West are in general quite different from each other.''. He also mentions religious and ethnic differences (with ''the white Protestants among the American participants'' showing ''the most 'Western' patterns of behavior'' while ''Catholics and minority group members . Some people will argue that you can only use one of them.. There are compelling arguments each way, and I will save you the pretension of my own explanation by rather pointing you to a couple of articles. "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." Like many scholars of human thought since at least Hume and Locke, today's cognitive psychologists tend to be "universalists," assuming that everyone perceives, thinks and reasons the same way. The second set of problems follows closely from this point. In one study, Michigan's Taka Masuda showed Japanese and American students pictures of aquariums containing one big fast-moving fish, several other finned swimmers, plants, rock and bubbles.