What influences the way we noticing things and prioritise our thoughts? I’ve been thinking a lot about that question over the last year and a half. I’ve been working on a big research project about biases, blindspots, mental traps, and subtle sways, those things which cause smart people to think in faulty ways and make bad decisions. It’s a good time to be researching in this field. Over the last three years, a new book on the subject has been published at a rate of one per month. Writers are offering advice to leaders about how to make good judgment calls. Even the cleverest among us make bad ones. I hope to review some of these books in the coming months and say a few things about my work.

As a preliminary step, I’d like to talk about the role that regional and national culture play in shaping our perceptions and understandings. We often assume that people in other parts of the world process information, at a very basic level, in the same way that we do. It’s true that there are a great many similarities. Humans are humans, after all, and biology plays a big role. Plus, as customs and norms spread across the globe with greater ease, we are becoming even more similar over time. However, cultural differences do exist and do influence our thinking. Indeed, ignoring the ways people from different places interpret the world can cause a lot of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

The claim that culture influences perception and cognition has a long tradition within the social sciences. George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and followers—the so-called symbolic interactionists—came to this conclusion in the first half of the 20th Century. They argued that (a.) the labels and meaning that we give to objects play a role in how those objects are perceived and treated, and (b.) those labels and meanings are shaped within social collectives as people interact. This remains a major school of thought within the field of social psychology. There is a lot of experimental and comparative-international evidence to back up the claim (plus a lot of flakey evidence, I have to admit). Yet it isn’t the current fashion to mention culture in many scientific circles.

Influential psychologists and neuro-scientists certainly give short shrift to cultural explanations. Evolutionary psychology is all the rage in these disciplines. The idea is that a human tendency once bestowed some sort of adaptive advantage back in the distant past, or is a byproduct of an adaptation. That tendency may or may not be useful today.

I’m not going to get into a debate about evolutionary psychology. I would simply stress that evolutionary psychology and cultural explanations can coexist. As Steven Pinker (2002) points out, humans are not “blank slates” to be written on by society. The brain—which is to also say “the mind”—is a biological organ with tendencies and limitations that evolved just like the rest of our bodies. That said, there is an enormous amount of variation in human behaviour and perceptions across the planet that can’t be explained with references to biology. These variations are best explained with cultural factors. (For more about this, check out these thought-provoking commentaries.)

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why by Richard E. Nisbett (Free Press, 2003), pp. xxiii, 264.

I preface with this debate because Richard Nisbett alludes to it in his book, The Geography of Thought, but doesn’t elaborate. Nisbett had been a “lifelong universalist,” meaning that he had previously assumed that humans thought in the same way at a very basic level. He kept finding evidence that suggests major differences in thinking patterns across the world. Eventually, he came to view different cultures as “self-reinforcing homeostatic systems,” which is a fancy way of saying: “The social practices promote the worldviews; the worldviews dictate the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both justify the worldviews and support the social practices.” (p. xx) Thus, there is something self-contained and self-referential about the way that culture shapes thinking.

What are these cultural differences? Nisbett is interested in two big patterns of thought. The first is in East Asia and is grounded in the Confucian/Taoist/Buddhist world-view. The second is in The West (Europe and European settler societies, particularly the United States) and is rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy. European Enlightenment ideals and Judeo-Christian religious philosophies presumably play a big role here too, although Nisbett chooses to downplay them for some reason. According to Nisbett, the two broad philosophical traditions establish certain assumptions that influence the way we think. What are these world-views, exactly? Nisbett boils it down to something like the this.

• Western societies are relatively individualist, with emphasis placed on personal agency and identity. Westerners are more likely to develop abstract theories to describe, categorize, and explain things. These abstract theories emphasize logic, linear causality, and discrete objects, while de-emphasizing contextual factors. Hard, black’n'white distinctions prevail, or at least properly labeled gradations on a continuum do. Argumentation and the scrutiny of evidence are seen as the way to improve the quality of knowledge. Nature is seen as controllable and people have a greater sense of volition.
• East Asian societies are relatively collectivist, with the emphasis on social harmony and self-control. Knowledge tends to be concrete, less abstract, and more practical. There is a tendency to look at the bigger picture; a holistic view that considers how everything influences everything else. East Asians are more comfortable coping with apparent contradictions and adopting compromise positions. Confrontation is avoided. These are “high-context” societies whereby the social context has a major bearing on the conveyance of meaning and norms. Moreover, people feel strongly embedded within in-groups, while being somewhat distanced from out-groups; Westerners see group affiliation as more fluid. The world is seen as an entangled and stable web of complex relationships, with change often leading to a return to a previous state of equilibrium.

According to Nisbett, these general orientations have a major impact on what gets noticed and how new information is understood. It’s these findings that I’d like to focus on.

To some, I expect that these depictions smell of stereotype. Nisbett does a decent job of building his argument with historical references. Yet he acknowledges that he’s at risk of oversimplifying, which is why he argues with disclaimers. So let’s take a look.

• First, Nisbett is looking at general (often subtle) tendencies in the way people think in East Asian and Western societies during their day-to-day lives. These world-views do not prevent, for example, students in East Asian societies from being good at mathematics and science, which is the case. Nor does it prevent Westerners from thinking holistically. Nonetheless, Nisbett argues, these world-views have a demonstrable influence. I’d argue that the modern interest in engineering, science, mathematics, and software development in Asian societies is already having a cultural impact, and that does muddy Nisbett’s categories somewhat.
• Second, Nisbett acknowledges a diversity within the two groups of countries. For example, people in Hong Kong and Singapore have world-views that are closer to Westerners. Those seem to be exceptions that prove the rule given the history of Western colonial influence in those places. However, continental European countries, notably Germany, are closer to East Asia relative to predominantly English-speaking Western societies. Nisbett has a harder time explaining those findings. It’s not like the Germanic peoples are known for their lack of logical distinctions and conceptual precision. According to Nisbett, Japan and Korea seem to be at one end of the continuum, with the United States on the other end.
• There have been Eastern traditions of logic, notably the Chinese Ming jia and followers of Mo-tzu. However, these ideas were neither mainstream nor very systematic in the way they treat inference.
• Finally, Nisbett is painting a picture based on a patchwork of available experimental evidence. So we can’t know how individual countries map out according to these world views because the experiments were not conducted in every country … or even a broad cross-section of countries. The majority of Nisbett’s Western evidence comes from the United States. Thus, Nisbett is going out on a limb with his big distinction between East Asia and The West. This isn’t the first time an American author relied heavily on American experimental evidence and labeled the results applicable to “The West” as a whole. This is a major weakness because it leads to dubious generalisations throughout the book.

Given all of these disclaimers, I can only conclude that Nisbett’s marquee distinction—East-Asia versus West—is overdone and, in a great many cases, is a major category-error. So I’m going to refer to the specific countries from which the evidence hails as much as possible.

What are Nisbett’s findings? I’ll review some of the ones I found most fascinating.

According to Nisbett, People in East Asian societies are more sensitive to social relations and this has a bearing on how arguments are treated. The traditional emphasis on harmonious relations, reciprocal obligation, and courtesy has resulted in East Asian languages having a reduced vocabulary with which to express individualism and vigorous yet constructive criticism. In memory tests, Chinese subjects were more likely to recall words when placed within a social context. In storytelling tests, Americans were more likely to place themselves at the centre of the story, whereas the Chinese are more likely to talk about casts of characters and point to small details about events. Moreover, in group problem-solving scenarios, the Japanese are more likely to seek safety in numbers, whereas Americans are more likely to think that they will be safer by exerting independence. East Asians are more likely to attribute the reason for a particular behaviour to contextual factors, whereas Americans are more likely to attribute blame to individuals who are assumed to act on their own volition (or based on personality traits).

The emphasis on holism in East Asia and the emphasis on salient objects in the West has caused people from the respective cultures to view physical substances differently, argues Nisbett. Westerners are more likely to notice the attributes and make-up of objects, whereas East Asians are more likely to look at continuous substances and their relationship to the environment. East Asian languages tend to emphasize verbs, whereas Western languages emphasize nouns. This is one reason why Westerners are more likely to categorize objects which, in turn, frame the way similar objects are considered. Learning how to categorize and master means-ends tasks happens later in child development among Korean children relative to English and French speaking children. In contrast, the emphasis on verbs in East Asian languages is a reason cited for greater emphasis on relations.

Nisbett looks at the way in which different cultures make visual distinctions, an important subject for those interested in visual thinking. East Asians are said to have higher levels of “field dependence,” meaning that they perceive objects in a way that is more sensitive to the background or environment. For example, in an experiment involving Americans and Japanese, subjects were shown animals against a backdrop. Americans were more likely to discuss animals in the foreground, whereas Japanese subjects were much more likely to notice background features and describe the scene in its entirety. In another experiment involving recognition, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to make errors when the background was manipulated and make slower judgments when an object was placed against a novel background. Studies also show that the way an object is classified has a major influence on the way that Americans judge the similarity and difference of visual objects compared to Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese. Even when it comes to something as simple as a trend-line on a graph, there are differences in perception. Americans are more likely to think of a trend-line as continuing in the same direction in the future, whereas the Chinese are more likely to consider the trend as falling back towards an equilibrium position in the future.

Given my aforementioned interest in cognitive biases, I’d like to highlight a few findings. Americans are less inclined to pay attention to contextual factors or multi-causal explanations compared to the Chinese. This makes them (by definition) more susceptible to single-cause attribution bias, or the tendency to fall for simplistic explanations that focus on only one factor. Consistent with this, Americans are more susceptible to the control illusion, the belief that they have effective control over all the factors necessary to achieve a complex objective. For their part, East Asians (Koreans) are less likely to be surprised by unexpected outcomes, which often comes with the rationalisation that they knew all along that such an outcome was likely (hindsight bias). East Asians (again Koreans) are said to be more vulnerable to the Barnum effect. This happens when a huckster (posing as a mind reader) describes a stranger with vague yet contradictory descriptors—creating a catch-all profile—and then asks whether the phony personality description is correct. This is presumably because East Asians are more comfortable with contradictions, particularly the experience of conflicting emotions at a given point in time. Americans are more vulnerable to self-perception biases that cause them to see themselves as having more positive traits compared to others, while also seeing themselves as having fewer negative traits compared to others.

These are all interesting findings. I also know of other findings that reinforce Nisbett’s thesis. However, I have a few critical thoughts.

The Geography of Thought falters a bit in the final chapters. Most of the findings in the book are drawn from experimental studies. Nisbett wonders whether his thesis applies to various real-world practical pursuits too. So he conducts a rapid-fire survey of such things as medicine, law, international relations, and so forth. Most parts of this discussion are really weak. For example, his discussion of law looks only at the ratio of lawyers to engineers in the U.S. and Japan. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, in this test, Western Society comes across as a lot more legalistic when it comes to conflict resolution. The rebuttal seems obvious to me: the U.S. is the only Western Society that is completely and utterly obsessed with law. And why are engineers the other item in the ratio? Japan is the second largest economy in the world and is more dependent on manufacturing than the U.S.; ergo, it has lots of engineers. Why not choose another vocation devoted to dispute resolution, such as social workers, bureaucratic authorities, and priests? That’s blatant cherry picking. I have similar quibbles of Nisbett’s brief discussions of medicine and religion.

Although I found some of Nisbett’s findings useful for explaining certain cultural differences, I worry that his sweeping generalisations of East versus West are overly simplistic. For example, while it is true that East Asian workers are less likely to have confrontational debates in group meetings compared to Americans, it is also true that workers in many Western societies are equally reluctant to enter into such debates. This has more to do with societal attitudes towards hierarchy and the evolution of modern workplace norms than it has to do with ancient philosophical traditions about discussing ideas. Indeed, it is entirely possible that, if evidence from a wider group of Western countries were included, the picture would look very different. Much of the non-American evidence cited by Nisbett draws from other predominantly English-speaking countries, such as Canada and Australia. These countries are similar to the United States relative to countries in continental Europe. Nisbett acknowledges that the East-Asian/Western distinction isn’t so clear-cut, yet much of his analysis and conclusions seems to ignore that admission. I suspect that a study that takes a larger array of countries into account would come up with a much more complex picture, one which couldn’t be explained by differences in the Confusion/Taoist/Buddhist philosophical tradition and the Ancient Greek/Enlightenment philosophical tradition. And I think this picture would be much more interesting.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a major difference in perception and thinking styles between Asia and the West. A number of big historical puzzles hinge on the issue, such as the so-called Needham Question. This question asks: why didn’t China develop scientific reasoning and technological prosperity long before Europeans given its head start? The whims of Chinese rulers had something to do with it. Yet, Nisbett’s argument would seem to be closer to a primary explanation: the mode of thinking that prevailed in China was not compatible with scientific reasoning, as we define it today. Nisbett doesn’t get into such historical questions to any great extent. That’s too bad.

My conclusion is that I think Nisbett has studied a fast-moving target (East Asia) without moving fast enough. He has also studied another big complex target (The West) without being comprehensive enough; indeed, he couldn’t even bothered to range much outside of the Lower 48. He has demonstrated that there are differences across cultures that ought to be considered but his book is only a toe-poke into that research topic.

Review By Peter Stoyko

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