http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7882

Westerners and Easterners see the world differently
22:00 22 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Zeeya Merali

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Chinese and American people see the world differently – literally.
While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese
individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists
at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.

“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East
Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett,
who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically,
focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they
should obey,” he says.

By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at
objects in relation to the whole. “Figuratively, Americans see things in black
and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,” says Nisbett. “We
wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal
difference in what they actually see.”

The researchers tracked the eye-movements of two groups of students
while they looked at photographs. One group contained American-born graduates
of European descent and the other was comprised of Chinese-born graduate
students who came to the US after their undergraduate degrees.

Each picture showed a striking central image placed in a realistic
background, such as a tiger in a jungle. They found that the American
students spent longer looking at the central object, while the Chinese
students’ eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.

Harmony versus goals
Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has
developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. “Harmony
is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on
how things relate to the whole,” says Nisbett. “In the West, by contrast,
life is about achieving goals.”

Psychologists watching American and Japanese families playing with toys
have also noted this difference. “An American mother will say: ‘Look Billy,
a truck. It’s shiny and has wheels.’ The focus is on the object,”
explains Nisbett. By contrast, Japanese mothers stress context saying things
like, “I push the truck to you and you push it to me. When you throw it at the
wall, the wall says ‘ouch’."

Nisbett also cites language development in the cultures. “To Westerners
it seems obvious that babies learn nouns more easily. But while this is
the case in the West, studies show that Korean and Chinese children pick up
verbs – which relate objects to each other - more easily.

“Nisbett’s work is interesting and suggestive,” says John Findlay, a
psychologist specialising in human visual attention at Durham
University, UK. “It’s always difficult to put an objective measure on cultural
differences, but this group have made a step towards that.”

Nisbett hopes that his work will change the way the cultures view each
other. “Understanding that there is a real difference in the way people
think should form the basis of respect.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol
102, p 12629)

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