Topic 30 of 42: Culture and thought
Tue, Sep 12, 2000 (08:38) |
Maggie (sociolingo)
How does our culture affect the way we think??? How do we see others who are different to ourselves?
8 responses total.
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 1 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Tue, Sep 12, 2000 (08:42) * 81 lines
August 8, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/080800hth-behavior-culture.html
How Culture Molds Habits of Thought
By ERICA GOODE
University of Michigan
Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people in different cultures think not just about different things, but think differently.
For more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have based their discussions of mental life on a cardinal assumption: that the same basic processes underlie all human thought, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of the Serengeti.
Cultural differences might dictate what people thought about. Teenage boys in Botswana, for example, might discuss cows with the same passion that New York teenagers reserved for sports cars.
But the habits of thought -- the strategies people adopted in processing information and making sense of the world around them -- were, Western scholars assumed, the same for everyone, exemplified by, among other things, a devotion to logical reasoning, a penchant for categorization and an urge to understand situations and events in linear terms of cause and effect.
Recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, however, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside down..
In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East Asians, Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things: they think differently.
"We used to think that everybody uses categories in the same way, that logic plays the same kind of role for everyone in the understanding of everyday life, that memory, perception, rule application and so on are the same," Dr. Nisbett said. "But we're now arguing that cognitive processes themselves are just far more malleable than mainstream psychology assumed."
In many respects, the cultural disparities the researchers describe mirror those described by anthropologists, and may seem less than surprising to Americans who have lived in Asia. And Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues are not the first psychological researchers to propose that thought may be embedded in cultural assumptions: Soviet psychologists of the 1930's posed logic problems to Uzbek peasants, arguing that intellectual tools were influenced by pragmatic circumstances.
But the new work is stirring interest in academic circles because it tries to define and elaborate on cultural differences through a series of tightly controlled laboratory experiments. And the theory underlying the research challenges much of what has been considered gospel in cognitive psychology for the last 40 years.
"If it's true, it turns on its head a great deal of the science that many of us have been doing, and so it's sort of scary and thrilling at the same time," said Dr. Susan Andersen, a professor of psychology at New York University and an associate editor at Psychological Review.
In the broadest sense, the studies -- carried out in the United States, Japan, China and Korea -- document a familiar division. Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic.
In one study, for example, by Dr. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, a graduate student at Michigan, students from Japan and the United States were shown an animated underwater scene, in which one larger "focal" fish swam among smaller fishes and other aquatic life.
Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, "There was a lake or pond" or "The bottom was rocky," or "The water was green." Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the largest fish, making statements like "There was what looked like a trout swimming to the right."
Over all, Japanese subjects in the study made 70 percent more statements about aspects of the background environment than Americans, and twice as many statements about the relationships between animate and inanimate objects. A Japanese subject might note, for example, that "The big fish swam past the gray seaweed."
"Americans were much more likely to zero in on the biggest fish, the brightest object, the fish moving the fastest," Dr. Nisbett said. "That's where the money is as far as they're concerned."
But the greater attention paid by East Asians to context and relationship was more than just superficial, the researchers found. Shown the same larger fish swimming against a different, novel background, Japanese participants had more difficulty recognizing it than Americans, indicating that their perception was intimately bound with their perception of the background scene.
When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker than the Americans to detect when people's behavior was determined by situational pressures.
Psychologists have long documented what they call the fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work. Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example, most people will still believe that the speaker believes what he is saying.
Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may in some situations be less susceptible to such errors, indicating that they do not describe a universal way of thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.
In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Incheol Choi, of Seoul National University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had been given "no choice" about what to write.
But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to "err," judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the essays.
When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs.
One of the most striking dissimilarities found by the researchers emerged in the way East Asians and Americans in the studies responded to contradiction. Presented with weaker arguments running contrary to their own, Americans were likely to solidify their opinions, Dr. Nisbett said, "clobbering the weaker arguments," and resolving the threatened contradiction in their own minds. Asians, however, were more likely to modify their own position, acknowledging that even the weaker arguments had some merit.
In one study, for example, Asian and American subjects were presented with strong arguments in favor of financing a research project on adoption. A second group was presented both with strong arguments in support of the project and weaker arguments opposing it.
Both Asian and American subjects in the first group expressed strong support for the research. But while Asian subjects in the second group responded to the weaker opposing arguments by decreasing their support, American subjects actually increased their endorsement of the project in response to the opposing arguments.
In a series of studies, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Kaiping Peng of the University of California at Berkeley found that Chinese subjects were less eager to resolve contradictions in a variety of situations than American subjects. Asked to analyze a conflict between mothers and daughters, American subjects quickly came down in favor of one side or the other. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit on both sides, commenting, for example, that, "Both the mothers and the daughters have failed to understand each other."
Given a choice between two different types of philosophical argument, one based on analytical logic, devoted to resolving contradiction, the other on a dialectical approach, accepting of contradiction, Chinese subjects preferred the dialectical approach, while Americans favored the logical arguments. And Chinese subjects expressed more liking than Americans for proverbs containing a contradiction, like the Chinese saying "Too modest is half boastful." American subjects, Dr. Nisbett said, found such contradictions "rather irritating."
Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan of the University of Illinois have also found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in conflict, Americans are more likely than Asians to adhere to the rules of formal logic, in keeping with a tradition that in Western societies began with the Ancient Greeks.
For example, presented with a logical sequence like, "All animals with fur hibernate. Rabbits have fur. Therefore rabbits hibernate," the Americans, the researchers found, were more likely to accept the validity of the argument, separating its formal structure, that of a syllogism, from its content, which might or might not be plausible. Asians, in contrast, more frequently judged such syllogisms as invalid based on their implausibility -- not all animals with fur do in fact hibernate.
While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence suggests that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has existed at least since ancient times, a tradition of adversarial debate, formal logical argument and analytic deduction flowering in Greece, while in China an appreciation for context and complexity, dialectical argument and a tolerance for the "yin and yang" of life flourished.
How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social and religious practices, different languages or even different geography is anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages, and both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the genes: Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable in their modes of thought from European-Americans.
Dr. Alan Fiske, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that experimental research like Dr. Nisbett's "complements a lot of ethnographic work that has been done."
"Anthropologists have been describing these cultures and this can tell you a lot about everyday life and the ways people talk and interact," Dr. Fiske said. "But it's always difficult to know how to make sense of these qualitative judgments, and they aren't controlled in the same way that an experiment is controlled."
Yet not everyone agrees that all the dissimilarities described by Dr. Nesbitt and his colleagues reflect fundamental differences in psychological process.
Dr. Patricia Cheng, for example, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that many of the researchers' findings meshed with her own experience. "Having grown up in a traditional Chinese family and also being in Western culture myself," she said, "I do see some entrenched habits of interpretation of the world that are different across the cultures, and they do lead to pervasive differences."
But Dr. Cheng says she thinks that some differences -- the Asian tolerance for contradiction, for example -- are purely social. "There is not a difference in logical tolerance," she said.
Still, to the extent that the studies reflect real differences in thinking and perception, psychologists may have to radically revise their ideas about what is universal and what is not, and to develop new models of mental process that take cultural influences into account
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 2 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Tue, Jun 26, 2001 (16:48) * 48 lines
Following on thinking about how we think ...here's some superstition to thin about ...
Mirrors
The jews believed that you should cover all of the mirrors because the soul of
the person might be caught in the mirror and could be snatched away by the ghost of the deceased, so those who saw their reflection during this time might in
fact be putting themselves in danger.
http://salc.wsu.edu/fs_fair/FS25/Documents/fs25/modern%20myths/mirrors.htm
Breaking a mirror can even make a skeptic shudder for a brief moment! The superstition is an old one and has managed to keep its strength over the years. In fact, many superstitions exist for mirrors but the particular beliefs entering around broken mirrors are the most common today.
Mirrors are thought to have two supernatural abilities:
They bring bad luck
The help tell the future
Before mirrors came along, any reflective surface was considered to be magical and credited with the ability to look into the future. In ancient mythology we can often find the gods and goddesses, as well as mere mortals, looking into the still water to catch a glimpse of their fate. The power of reflective surfaces to captivate and deceive are also featured strongly in such myths as Narcissus and Snow White.
Reflective surfaces like shiny metals and mirrors were also used to receive
messages from the gods.
Queen Elizabeth's court magician and well-known alchemist, John Dee, used a mirror for scrying. He has been credited with prophesying the plot to kill King James in 1605.
Because mirrors were thought to hold the key to the future, to break one was to shatter your own future. One of the techniques devised to reverse the bad luck was to bury all the pieces deep within the earth. Another superstition for breaking a mirror was that shortly thereafter a family member would die.
Other Mirror Superstitions:
To see your reflection in a mirror is to see your own soul, which is why a vampire, who are without a soul, have no reflection.
If a couple first catch sight of each other in a mirror, they will have a
happy marriage.
If a mirror falls and breaks by itself, someone in the house will soon die.
Any mirrors in a room where someone has recently died, must be covered so that the dead person's soul does not get trapped behind the glass. Superstition has it that the Devil invented mirrors for this very
purpose.
It is bad luck to see your face in a mirror when sitting by candlelight.
Before mirrors, in ancient societies, if you caught sight of your reflection or dreamt of it, you would soon die.
Someone seeing their reflection in a room where someone has recently died, will soon die themselves.
Babies should not look into a mirror for the first year of their lives.
Actors believe that it is bad luck to see their reflection while looking over the shoulder of another person.
To see an image of her future husband, a woman is told to eat an apple while sitting in front of a mirror and then brush her hair. An image of the man will
appear behind her shoulder.
http://www.csicop.org/superstition/library/mirrors.html
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 3 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Tue, Jun 26, 2001 (16:51) * 1 lines
Thinking about this ...Can you think of any underlying beliefs that have formed these superstitions???
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 4 of 8: Culcha (terry) * Tue, Jun 26, 2001 (19:00) * 1 lines
The feng shui folks use mirrors a lot to patch things up, to create a space where there isn't one. I guess they use the illusion of creating a space.
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 5 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Fri, Jun 29, 2001 (16:09) * 1 lines
Is illusion thought? I wonder if there is an underlying belief behind the use of mirrors in feng shui ..I'll have a look around and see if i find something.
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 6 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Sat, Jun 30, 2001 (08:07) * 12 lines
Here's an article baout Feng Shui and the use of mirrors ...should shed some light on the issue ...
Feng Shui and Mirrors?
April 1998 http://www.168fengshui.com/Articles/Article_Mirrors.html
Frequently, Feng Shui practitioners in America utilize mirrors as a cure. We consistently see mirrors being used upon the recommendation of a prior "master." According to one web site, "Mirrors are known to be the aspirin of Feng Shui" (Although I tend to think of them as placebos). What do these mirrors do and how do they affect the Feng Shui in a house or business?
Let me first start out with saying that 168 Feng Shui Advisors recommends the use of mirrors as a bathroom tool to comb your hair by. Beyond that, mirrors only serve a visual or artistic effect. Mirrors have been misrepresented as a Feng Shui "cure" by a lot of practitioners. Here in this country, these practitioners claim that mirrors will reflect negative Chi and spirits. Have you ever tried to reflect heat with a mirror, or perhaps x-rays? Mirrors only reflect light, a narrow area of the energetic spectrum. Chi, defined as "life energy," flows around and through each of us, is not diverted by a four inch, eight edged mirror.Mirrors have a useful nature. They can be used to hide pillars, to expand the appearance of a room, and to be used in a piece of art. A small restaurant in Monterey Park, California, which we frequent, uses mirrors to hide the support pillars of the restaurant. Without the mirrors, the pillars would divide the room and make the restaurant appear smaller. While this is an architectural
remedy, but has nothing to do with the chi of the building. It can be said that from a Feng Shui perspective, it does create a better environment. After all, Feng Shui is about creating a more comfortable and supportive environment. Let me clarify, while mirrors might be recommended as a visual change, they are not a remedy against bad chi. Traditional Feng Shui utilizes only the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water as remedies to energetic issues in a house or building. Mirrors do not play any part as a remedy. Often you will see mirrored baguas opposing each other on two houses that face each other. Sometimes there will be a bagua feud - the bigger bagua wins. This is not Feng Shui, but rather superstition mixed with egotism. Traditional Feng Shui does not subscribe to mysticism, superstition, or religion.
So how did mirrors get mixed into Feng Shui concepts? It is very likely that one of two things (or perhaps both) created this belief in mirrors. First, in the Middle Ages, mirrors were made of polished brass. A master would suggest that you need a mirror in a certain area. It was not the mirror, but rather the brass (metal element) that would create the remedy.Another very likely misunderstanding is a very well known Feng Shui book title: "Eight House Mirror Theory." This book says nothing about mirrors as a remedy, but rather, it infers that after performing calculations based on the eight directions, you will have the answer before you as clear as a mirror. Again, people who knew about this book, but did not know or understand its contents probably took the title as a literal recommendation. Mirrors as stated above, can create an architectural or artistic effect, but are not to be mixed with Feng Shui remedies. If you are looking for a Feng Shui practitioner, be wary of those who prescribe mirrors as a so
ution to your Feng Shui woes.
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 7 of 8: Culcha (terry) * Sat, Jun 30, 2001 (08:52) * 1 lines
Yeah, I always rolled my eyes a bit when the feng shui practicioner who scoped out our house got to the part about putting mirrors out in fields (or outside anywhere for that matter) to reduce the effect of areas of "bad energy". That's going a bit too far for me, it would seem like a "band aid" treatment, I rather go to the extra effort to fix the bad energy. But at least I have a good persepctive on mirrors and feng shui now.
Topic 30 of 42 [cultures]: Culture and thought
Response 8 of 8: Maggie (sociolingo) * Sat, Jun 30, 2001 (09:44) * 1 lines
What interests me is the reasoning or belief behind these superstitions.The link between cultural acts and thought.
cultures conference 
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