Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 140

Which is true? (a) Cigarette smoking is correlated with being skinny; (b) heavy doses of nicotine often result in becoming overweight. Although I cannot predict which one you chose, I am betting that you selected only one. People from Western cultures, such as those in Western Europe and North America, tend to believe that only one of the statements is true because they appear to contradict one another. East Asians, in contrast, would be less likely to view them in an either/or fashion and would instead try to identify a third way, one in which both can be correct or partially correct (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). This example, adapted from research by Peng and Nisbett (1999), illustrates how tolerance for contradiction in particular and fundamental reasoning processes more generally vary across cultures.

That humans must categorize information, store information in memory, and solve social and other problems is universally true; however, the way we accomplish these tasks can depend on our cultural background (Berry, 2015; Chiu & Hong, 2007; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1999). Some of the most important cultural variations in cognitive processes roughly occur along an East-West division, with the East referring to East Asia and the West to North America and Western Europe (Zaroff, D’Amato, & Bender, 2014). These cultural distinctions can be traced back at least 2,000 years to the Chinese scholar Confucius, on the one hand, and the Greek philosopher Socrates, on the other (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).

The core distinction is nicely summarized by a statement made by a Chinese student to Richard Nisbett, an American social psychologist: “The difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it is a line” (Nisbett, 2003, p. xiii). What this short sentence refers to is the fundamentally divergent ways that reality is perceived by Easterners versus Westerners (Medin & Atran, 2004; Norenzayan, Choi, & Peng, 2007). A Westerner may zoom in on a circle and see only one segment, which would resemble a line. An Easterner would stand back and see the entire circle. The Westerner sees change as linear and one directional, as if a person were traveling along a one-way road leading into the future. In contrast, the Easterner sees change as cyclical, as if a person were traversing a path that repeatedly folds back onto itself.

Paintings East and West

Western paintings typically have a lower horizon and larger people; Eastern paintings tend to have higher horizons and to depict people as small in comparison to their environment.

By Poemandpainting (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Author: Mr. Chen Minglou.

Heritage Images/Corbis. Author: George Orleans De La Motte.

Another East-West difference is illustrated by prototypical paintings from each cultural group. Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, and Nisbett (2008) examined the content and perspective in paintings of people by Chinese and Western artists. They found that, in general, Chinese paintings depicted people as relatively small in relationship to their environment, whereas the Western paintings place people at the forefront of the painting, generally overshadowing the background. The difference in perspective further exemplifies how East Asians tend to step back and look at the big picture, whereas North Americans hone in on close-ups of particular elements. Hence, we generally find that landscape paintings from the East have higher horizons, in contrast to paintings from the West. Moreover, Westerners tend to view persons and objects as separate from their environments rather than as parts of larger sets of relationships among people or things (Norenzayan, Choi, & Nisbett, 2002). In general, Easterners see the world as much more complex than do Westerners. This broader view taken by Easterners is holistic, in contrast to Westerners’ more analytic approach. The former considers the whole picture or situation, whereas the latter analyzes or breaks it down into its parts.

These differences even extend to how these two cultural groups solve problems. In one study, participants were asked to evaluate the usefulness of various clues in solving a hypothetical murder mystery (Choi, Dalal, Kim-Prieto, & Park, 2003). Korean participants viewed far more details of the circumstances surrounding the crime as relevant to solving it, whereas Americans quickly eliminated less important details and focused on only a few clues. In other words, the Koreans took into account many more factors than did the Americans.

In sum, East-West differences extend well beyond language and custom to such phenomena as fundamental reasoning processes (Norenzayan, Smith, Kim, & Nisbett, 2002), susceptibility to cognitive illusions (Segall, Campbell, & Herskovits, 1963), how people explain social behavior (see Chapter 5) (Morris & Peng, 1994), and laypeople’s understanding of biology (Medin, Unsworth, & Hirschfeld, 2007).