I'm turning Japanese, I really think so
I recently finished a book called The Geography of Thought, by Richard Nisbett (someone I'd probably want to try to work with if I ever went back to grad school). The general thesis is that people of the West (broadly defined) have been raised in a Greco-Roman intellectual culture that emphasizes the isolation of the actor from background context, as well as linear causality and the application of logic to non-formal situations. People of the East (even more broadly defined) substitute a tradition of Confucian-based reasoning, leading to wider consideration of contextual factors and a more dialectical (as opposed to linear) model of how the world works.
I know, I know: duh. But Nisbett, clever psychologist, shows several experimental contexts in which East and West draw different conclusions. For example: given two arrays of drawings that depict simply-drawn flowers that differ from each other in various subtle ways and asked which group a new flower drawing should be put into, East opts for overall "family resemblance," while West goes for a rule-based approach ("all the flowers in Group A have bent stems; none of the flowers in Group B do; the new flower has a bent stem").
Before you rush out and Amazon a copy on the basis of that scintillating precis, let me add that Nisbett was obviously under pressure from the publishers to write at a sixth-grade level (I've read his academic articles, so I know it's not Nisbett). It also doesn't go into as much depth as I'd like, which left me screaming at the book "of course Asian babies learn verbs faster than Western babies! That's not "field-dependence" -- that's Asian languages having non-inflected verbs!" I mean, I'm sure issues like that were adequately addressed in the studies themselves.
But the funny thing is that when I tested myself on the examples in the book, I kept coming up Asian. I mean, 100 percent. Then I'd go back and read the justification for each group's choice, and think "oh, of course!" and look at the example again and immediately see the Western perspective. But it certainly wasn't the first thing springing to mind. And yes, I know: it's called "priming," and it's probably situational and temporary, but that doesn't make it feel any less weird.
I know, I know: duh. But Nisbett, clever psychologist, shows several experimental contexts in which East and West draw different conclusions. For example: given two arrays of drawings that depict simply-drawn flowers that differ from each other in various subtle ways and asked which group a new flower drawing should be put into, East opts for overall "family resemblance," while West goes for a rule-based approach ("all the flowers in Group A have bent stems; none of the flowers in Group B do; the new flower has a bent stem").
Before you rush out and Amazon a copy on the basis of that scintillating precis, let me add that Nisbett was obviously under pressure from the publishers to write at a sixth-grade level (I've read his academic articles, so I know it's not Nisbett). It also doesn't go into as much depth as I'd like, which left me screaming at the book "of course Asian babies learn verbs faster than Western babies! That's not "field-dependence" -- that's Asian languages having non-inflected verbs!" I mean, I'm sure issues like that were adequately addressed in the studies themselves.
But the funny thing is that when I tested myself on the examples in the book, I kept coming up Asian. I mean, 100 percent. Then I'd go back and read the justification for each group's choice, and think "oh, of course!" and look at the example again and immediately see the Western perspective. But it certainly wasn't the first thing springing to mind. And yes, I know: it's called "priming," and it's probably situational and temporary, but that doesn't make it feel any less weird.
9 Comments:
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 5:46 AM
-
esquiver said...
-
- 7:07 AM
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 8:43 AM
-
esquiver said...
-
- 1:18 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 3:58 PM
-
Emily said...
-
- 9:52 AM
-
esquiver said...
-
- 1:36 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 4:45 AM
-
Anonymous said...
-
- 11:27 PM
Post a CommentThis explains a lot, obviously. (Need I say "Thailand"?) As you know, I always thought you were easily one of the two most intelligent people in our h.s. class. (Shortroad being the other, although he's extremely logically oriented.) Maybe that's because your intellectual framework, so exotic in our little bubble, produced some astonishingly mature insights. (Your sketching phase: "Mrs. K goes for baroque")
I know that I have a tendency to romanticize Eastern thought despite the fact that I would probably score more Western than Asian. (I'd be counting petals on the flowers, sorting them into odds and evens.) This romanticization is certainly aided by daily witnessing the inability or unwillingness of Western people to put themselves in a broader context, which has led to many intractable problems (global warming comes to mind as London temps hover in the 90s).
Do you think, however, that the Asian intellectual framework has societal consequences that you'd be comfortable with? I wonder whether it isn't easier to be a Western woman or gay man than it would be to be an Asian version of either.
I may dislike the West at times, but I know that I owe my individual freedoms to the hegemony of its intellectual framework over the past few centuries. Might you feel the same way?
Aw, A, you're makin' me blush.
You raise a really interesting point, though: is an emphasis on individual freedoms necessarily tied to the kind of Western mindset Nisbett studied?
By way of verbose reply, I should mention that Nisbett found that not all West was equally West. For example, Europeans tended to score as less dramatically Western, and, even within the U.S., Jews scored as less Western than Christians.
To digress for just a sec: I think it's important to point out that this means "Western" is a shorthand for something more complex, as Jews aren't exactly known for the Confucian foundations of our thought. But it's true that there're cultural components more coincidentally in sync with characteristics of Eastern thought. For example, when Christians are asked to predict, after a happy event, their future happiness, they continue to expand the trend (sort of using a "First Law of Motion" principle). Jews will predict being less happy in the future, using a kind of zero-balanced "conservation of happiness" model, which jibes more with the Eastern dialectical framework, albeit for different reasons. (Interestingly, there is is minor phenomenon of Jews adopting Buddhism -- though it's not clear how much of the variance can be explained by Bob Dylan.)
All of which is to say that we do see "Western"-ness varying independently of level of individual freedom. If you agree that Europeans have greater individual freedoms than Americans (and until recently, I would have disagreed, but no longer), then you don't necessarily have a positive correlation between the two things.
The Eastern cultures I've seen have been wildly, fascinatingly non-egalitarian. I suspect (though it's an open and interesting question) that nonegalitarianism is a necessary part of this kind of cognitive system. But the system variables are fluid: in India, both sex and caste discrimination are rampant, and one is certainly better off as a Brahmin woman than a Dalit man. It's certainly easier to be gay in Thailand than in the U.S. (though that's cheating a bit, rhetorically, for reasons that would take a huge digression to explain), where a version of "class" weighs more heavily than sex or anything else.
Don't forget, both Shortroad and I endorse the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology, even if we disagree on all its implications. I think both "East" and "West" are minor variants of the same basic wiring and not coextensive with race. I have no doubt I'll be scoring fully "Western" after I'm back in the States for a bit. I also think there are other pan-species-level evolutionary issues (paternity certainty, etc) that inspire the subjugation of women and thus have found expression in virtually all cultures (quick clarification: have done so; obviously, I don't think they must do so). Though culture can amplify that inequality, as Confucianism does, I don't think other cultural features account for it -- after all, the history of oppression of women in the West is more of a flaw in a logical outlook than a feature of one.
Another quick point (any longer, and I'm gonna make this an entry rather than a comment): are you sure it's individual freedoms you want to elevate? Look at the "group rights" framework of the Nordic countries, and aren't women and gays generally better-off there? I don't know where "North" fits in to the East-West divide, but it'd be quite interesting to know.
Jews and Buddhism I think is not a function of the Jewish mind being more receptive to Buddhism, but more a function of the Jewish religion not having the combination of a carrot-stick heaven-hell metaphysics that keeps people within the meme and not having the cultural reinforcement that a majority religion like Christianity does. Jews thus have smaller psychic and social costs in converting to Buddhism than Christians do, so simply as a matter of economics, one would expect American Jews to be more likely to become Buddhists than American Christians.
I'm really surprised at your contention that Europeans have more individual rights than Americans do. Outside of bars on the death penalty, I can't think of any unambiguous rights where Europeans come out ahead; any other special rights granted to Europeans absent Americans are conflicting rights—the right not to be spanked by your parents versus the autonomous rights of parents to raise their children without interference of the state; the right to medical care is achieved by imposing substandard care upon the entire population. But (for better or worse) in matters of freedom of speech, economic freedoms, self-defense, criminal procedure, even access to courts, Americans come out ahead of Europeans.
Ted, I mentioned the Buddhism thing only because I've seen it reported; I don't accept it uncritically. My own theory is that the apparent Jew-Bu connection is an artifact: I hypothesize that it's the more secular segment of any religion that's more likely to go Buddhist (never mind heaven and hell; what about jettisoning God?), and that a lapsed Christian (excepting Catholics) is merely a garden-variety agnostic, whereas a secular Jew is still going to show up in the stats as a Jew.
And all rights are conflicting rights, aren't they? When talking about women, gays, or any other historically oppressed group, "freedom from" is more important than "freedom to." But that's a point you and I have always differed on.
Hmm. I'd say that "group" rights are really society's shorthand for aggregating/assigning individual rights to the groups to which it's most relevant, no?
For instance, consider that in Nordic countries, any consenting adult can marry any other consenting adult so long as neither adult is already married. When expressed in that form, it's just a universal individual right, but it's one that opposite-sex adults have had since society first started organizing around monogamous two-person relationships. As a result, the re-articulation of the individual right is described as an expansion of "gay rights" because it explicitly grants a freedom to gay men and lesbians that didn't previously exist.
Or consider the right to return to your previous job at full pay after a year of caring for your newborn biological or adopted child. Again, it's really a universal right, but one that has generally not been relevant to men because women continue overwhemlingly to be the principal caregiver to a newborn. Hence's, women's rights.
Or were you getting at something else?
I like Nisbett's idea that there is a spectrum of Western-ness. From your reading of him, is his spectrum's key differentiating variable the "freedom to" vs. "freedom from" dichotomy that you suggest in your response to Ted above?
I find myself wondering where Canada, with its official policy of multiculturalism, would fit in the Western vs. Eastern framework. Canada has long seemed to have a much broader sense of itself in the world than the US does, I suspect largely because it never broke violently from its colonizing power.
Anglophile, Emily - I don't know if you'll find this under the Lonavala avalanche, above (sorry -- words are another self-calming strategy for me. More stress? More words!), but:
Em: I think I recall that Canadians scored more like Europeans (and probably for the reason you state).
Anglophile: I'm on-board (I think). What I had in mind was the restriction of individual license in exchange for a higher quality of life for the group as a whole (more along the lines of the healthcare example Ted raised, but with an entirely different conclusion. Well-worn ground for Ted and me).
Frustratingly, the book didn't really address why some Western-but-less-so cultures might end up that way -- especially vexing, as I don't think we really want to claim that Europe participates less in the Greco-Roman logical tradition. Other variables are obviously at work, but Nisbett sticks close to the data. I don't know how the "freedom to/from" dichotomy would translate into the experimental findings, but it'd make a helluva dissertation.
Sounds like someone wants to cobble together even a remotely credible reason to go back to graduate school. ;-)
the right to return to your previous job at full pay after a year of caring for your newborn biological or adopted child
That's a right achieved only by limiting the right to freedom of contract. These sorts of stricter restrictions on the ability to freely hire and fire are not costless and have a lot to do with why Europe has an unemployment rate twice that of the US, and considerably less entrepreneurship. (NB that American manufacturers that have adopted the European model through collective bargaining with unions are economic basket cases.)
<< Home