Crucially, our “social orientation” appears to spill over into more fundamental aspects of reasoning.
People in more collectivist societies tend to be more ‘holistic’ in the
way they think about problems, focusing more on the relationships and
the context of the situation at hand, while people in individualistic
societies tend to focus on separate elements, and to consider situations
as fixed and unchanging.
As a simple example, imagine that you
see a picture of someone tall intimidating someone smaller. Without any
additional information, Westerners are more likely to think this
behaviour reflects something essential and fixed about the big man: he
is probably a nasty person. “Whereas if you are thinking holistically,
you would think other things might be going on between those people:
maybe the big guy is the boss or the father,” explains Henrich.
Your social orientation can even change the way you see
And
this thinking style also extends to the way we categorise inanimate
objects. Suppose you are asked to name the two related items in a list
of words such as “train, bus, track”. What would you say? This is known
as the “triad test”, and people in the West might pick “bus” and “train”
because they are both types of vehicles. A holistic thinker, in
contrast, would say “train” and “track”, since they are focusing on the
functional relationship between the two – one item is essential for the
other’s job.
It can even change the way that you see. An eye-tracking study
by Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan found that
participants from East Asia tend to spend more time looking around the
background of an image – working out the context – whereas people in
America tended to spend more time concentrating on the main focus of the
picture. Intriguingly, this distinction could also be seen in children’s drawings
from Japan and Canada, suggesting that the different ways of seeing
emerge at a very young age. And by guiding our attention, this narrow or
diverse focus directly determines what we remember of a scene at a
later date.
“If we are what we see, and we are attending to different stuff, then we are living in different worlds,” says Henrich.
Although some people have claimed that our social orientation may have a genetic element, the evidence to date suggests that it is learned from others. Alex Mesoudi at the University of Exeter recently profiled the thinking styles of British Bangladeshi families in East London.
He found that within one generation, the children of immigrants had
started to adopt some elements of the more individualistic outlook, and
less holistic cognitive styles. Media use, in particular, tended to be
the biggest predictor of the shift. “It tended to be more important than
schooling in explaining that shift.”
But why did the different
thinking styles emerge in the first place? The obvious explanation would
be that they simply reflect the prevailing philosophies that have come
to prominence in each region over time. Nisbett points out
that Western philosophers emphasised freedom and independence, whereas
Eastern traditions like Taoism tended to focus on concepts of unity.
Confucius, for instance, emphasised the “obligations that obtained
between emperor and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older
brother and younger brother, and between friend and friend”. These
diverse ways of viewing the world are embedded in the culture’s
literature, education, and political institutions, so it is perhaps of
little surprise that those ideas have been internalised, influencing
some very basic psychological processes.
from : http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways