More on perceptual differences -- this time cultural
Asians, Americans Show Perceptual Divide
Updated: 10:35 PM EDT By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.
The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students - 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese - to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.
"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.
"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it."
The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.
And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.
In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.
So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did.
Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.
The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.
The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.
In the latest test, the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures.
The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner - a leopard in the jungle for example - and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.
Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural, he said, when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.
Kyle R. Cave of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst commented: "These results are particularly striking because they show that these cultural differences extend to low level perceptual processes such as how we control our eyes. They suggest that the way that we see and explore the world literally depends on where we come from."
Cave said researchers in his lab have found differences in eye movement between Asians and Westerners in reading, based on differences in the styles of writing in each language.
"When you look beyond this study to all of the studies finding cultural differences, you find that people from one culture do better on some tasks, while people from other cultures do better on others. I think it would be hard to argue from these studies that one culture is generally outperforming the other cognitively," Cave said.
Yes!!! I guessed this was true and knew about the Japanese study with the fish.
It drives me absolutely nuts when I try to explain a situation "contextually" to your average American person and they don't understand or get impatient rolling eyes and saying things like "could you get to the point already".
I have learned [especially in a business situation] to try to do a kind of "dumbing down" of things and put the information into a more "Western" way of understanding things. But after a while the process can be mentally exhausting and trying. It's as though you have to speak backwards and give the least important information first.
And of course in many cases that information is "inverted" and without the crucial "background" information so it doesn't make sense and takes much longer to get things done. By coincidence I had a very good example of this just this morning.
Some friends were worried about an elderly woman who was taken to hospital by ambulance yesterday and has not returned or been heard from since. The woman had been ill for a while and had a tracheotomy which prevents her from speaking clearly. So they have been calling the hospital where the Ambulance said they were taking her and when there was no record of her there other hospital where she might have been taken with no luck.
After getting no where they called me and asked it I could call for them. They were afraid that since there speech patterns were that of Caribbean and African American peoples they were being deliberately ignored or worse mislead [especially since the elderly lady was Jewish . . . they thought maybe the hospital workers assumed that they wanted to rob her apartment or something]. Since I can "mimic" standard American speech more easily they had me call.
Anyway . . . .
When I called all the clerks would ask was "last name, please spell". They would then look it up on their computers and snap "no person of that name shown on our records" and then attempt to hang up on me. The fact that she was an elderly lady with a speech impediment so therefore her name might not be properly recorded did not occur to them. Trying to get them to listen to that [very important] part of the situation was absolutely impossible. No matter what I said they kept repeating "last name, please spell" like some sort of demented automaton gone wrong.
So I gave up and did it "their" way whic was without taking the crucial "contextual" information into account. First I had to give them the last name. Then I had to listen to them say "no such person shown". Then I had to screech at them to keep them to keep them from hanging up. Then I had to explain that maybe they had the last name wrong so they'd ask for "first name please spell". Then we'd have "no such person show". The we'd have the trying to hang up part. Then we'd move on to address, etc.
After I let them fully exhaust "their" way then and only then would they let me explain about the Trach and the difficulties speaking. Then and only then would they finally connect me to the correct person who could actually search by date, time, description of person and problem.
So, in general we can say that many times if you don't get the "context" you don't really get the correct information. And many times in interactions with western institutions and persons you have an exhausting struggle to get thru to them what they are literally "not seeing".
Updated: 10:35 PM EDT By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.
The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students - 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese - to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.
"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.
"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it."
The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.
And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.
In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.
So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did.
Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.
The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.
The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.
In the latest test, the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures.
The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner - a leopard in the jungle for example - and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.
Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural, he said, when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.
Kyle R. Cave of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst commented: "These results are particularly striking because they show that these cultural differences extend to low level perceptual processes such as how we control our eyes. They suggest that the way that we see and explore the world literally depends on where we come from."
Cave said researchers in his lab have found differences in eye movement between Asians and Westerners in reading, based on differences in the styles of writing in each language.
"When you look beyond this study to all of the studies finding cultural differences, you find that people from one culture do better on some tasks, while people from other cultures do better on others. I think it would be hard to argue from these studies that one culture is generally outperforming the other cognitively," Cave said.
Yes!!! I guessed this was true and knew about the Japanese study with the fish.
It drives me absolutely nuts when I try to explain a situation "contextually" to your average American person and they don't understand or get impatient rolling eyes and saying things like "could you get to the point already".
I have learned [especially in a business situation] to try to do a kind of "dumbing down" of things and put the information into a more "Western" way of understanding things. But after a while the process can be mentally exhausting and trying. It's as though you have to speak backwards and give the least important information first.
And of course in many cases that information is "inverted" and without the crucial "background" information so it doesn't make sense and takes much longer to get things done. By coincidence I had a very good example of this just this morning.
Some friends were worried about an elderly woman who was taken to hospital by ambulance yesterday and has not returned or been heard from since. The woman had been ill for a while and had a tracheotomy which prevents her from speaking clearly. So they have been calling the hospital where the Ambulance said they were taking her and when there was no record of her there other hospital where she might have been taken with no luck.
After getting no where they called me and asked it I could call for them. They were afraid that since there speech patterns were that of Caribbean and African American peoples they were being deliberately ignored or worse mislead [especially since the elderly lady was Jewish . . . they thought maybe the hospital workers assumed that they wanted to rob her apartment or something]. Since I can "mimic" standard American speech more easily they had me call.
Anyway . . . .
When I called all the clerks would ask was "last name, please spell". They would then look it up on their computers and snap "no person of that name shown on our records" and then attempt to hang up on me. The fact that she was an elderly lady with a speech impediment so therefore her name might not be properly recorded did not occur to them. Trying to get them to listen to that [very important] part of the situation was absolutely impossible. No matter what I said they kept repeating "last name, please spell" like some sort of demented automaton gone wrong.
So I gave up and did it "their" way whic was without taking the crucial "contextual" information into account. First I had to give them the last name. Then I had to listen to them say "no such person shown". Then I had to screech at them to keep them to keep them from hanging up. Then I had to explain that maybe they had the last name wrong so they'd ask for "first name please spell". Then we'd have "no such person show". The we'd have the trying to hang up part. Then we'd move on to address, etc.
After I let them fully exhaust "their" way then and only then would they let me explain about the Trach and the difficulties speaking. Then and only then would they finally connect me to the correct person who could actually search by date, time, description of person and problem.
So, in general we can say that many times if you don't get the "context" you don't really get the correct information. And many times in interactions with western institutions and persons you have an exhausting struggle to get thru to them what they are literally "not seeing".