The Learner > Background
Confucian heritage
Many considerations of cross cultural difference – particularly between East and West – are based upon noticing historical differences in political and social order. These, in turn, are understood as longstanding philosophical biases of cognition: preferences in how individuals go about making sense of their natural and social world. Nisbett (2005) explores this historical perspective very effectively when inviting us to consider an East-West contrast in general psychological makeup. He draws our attention to how the world was analysed differently within the ancient Greek tradition, compared with the parallel ancient Chinese tradition. For modern commentators, it is tempting to think that there are lines of inheritance from these historical roots: continuities between deeply-anchored cognitive and social traditions and, for example, how people in different places go about learning today.
In contemplating these two rich civilisations – Chinese and Greek – it is common to remark on the success of the Asian world in what we would now term “technology” versus the success of the Greeks in what we might term “science”. This, in turn, may suggest cultural differences related to pragmatic versus theoretical dispositions. Similarly, it may suggest more or less interest in abstraction or logic, and more or less interest in the practices of engineering and material control.
However, further differences of a more social-psychological nature are implied by other contrasting patterns of cultural investment. The Greeks, it is argued, manifested a vigorous sense of personal agency – a celebration of their capacity to act according to their individual will. Nisbett (2005) notes how a Greek citizen must have been willing to stop work and travel long distances simply to see a play or listen to poetry. This modest example implies the exercise of will or purpose that we associate with a firm sense of individuality. The apparently strong sense of unique identity seemed to resource those lively traditions of debate and argument typical of Greek society. The Greeks were individuals oriented towards the world with an active curiosity about how it worked and a concern to debate the possibilities. It is sometimes claimed that the Greeks discovered the idea of “nature” by simply having distinguished it from culture: a distinction that served to characterise the world with human presence versus the world without it.
The Chinese citizen seemed motivated to take part in social gatherings of a more intimate design. The Greek sense of agency is to be contrasted with the Chinese sense of harmony. Here there is less interest in configuring an objective/subjective polarity and more in seeking a form of concordance or equilibrium involving self-in-the-world. This might be expressed in terms of a kind of a felt depth of interdependence between individuals (or objects) and their social (or material) contexts. Individuals experienced life very much as members of collectives – family, village, nation. The roles adopted in these community contexts served to create the sense of individual identity. Activity would have been motivated less by a concern to control the environment as to self-control, thereby minimising friction with others.
Numerous authors have linked these accounts of former cultural patterns to modern conceptualisations of Eastern and Western learning preferences. Moreover, commentators have mediated this link through the anchor points of two philosophical legacies from Chinese and Greek culture: the Confucian and the Socratic traditions respectively (Dien, 1997; Nisbett, 2005; On, 1996; Tweed and Lehman, 2002).
A Socratic attitude is characterised (through Plato’s documentation) as a strong tendency for individuals to evaluate and interrogate the world. This is typically done through practices of dialogic probing, and debate. Such dialogue can be subversive: because, when effectively exercised, it can expose individuals for what they know and do not know. Indeed students may take pleasure from witnessing and emulating such probing encounters. Individuals are motivated to find error, to impose doubts and, more generally, to interrogate others in such a way that makes them conscious of their own limited knowledge. Meanwhile, knowledge itself is seen as something self-generated: in the sense of arising from social actions but, also, in the sense of being latent within the individual. Socrates’ famous Meno dialogue with a slave boy supposedly illustrated not Socrates’ skill as a transmitter of knowledge, but his skill as an agent for eliciting something already present within the novice partner-in-dialogue.
The Chinese contrast to this is perhaps better understood as a blend of three philosophical/spiritual traditions: Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. It is the middle member of this trio that is most singularly associated with an intellectual counterpoint to the Socratic disposition. Within such a comparison, the social links in Confucian thinking are much more about the realisation of certain moral obligations towards others. These are expressed as “ethical relations” that must be strived for in the interest of creating social harmony. As with the Socratic tradition, Intellectual growth also takes place within forms of social encounter. But this is a matter of the learner absorbing and transmitting knowledge, rather than articulating personal hypotheses and confronting protagonists.
Note that the Confucian tradition does not thereby deny agency, neither does it promote a more passive form of learning. In both cases, it represents these psychological qualities differently.
In the Confucian system, truth is simply “there”. It is something to be found. But it is not to be found within the self. For truth is already known through the larger community of which one is a part – and that is where it is to be located for the individual. This “finding” is, however, a more deferential and modest process. Accordingly, the knower may be more cautious over innovation.
Agency is also a real phenomenon in the Confucian tradition. But it is to be found within the social context. Thus, perfectibility of the self is consistent with a collectivist attitude. It is understood in terms of a social role – indeed, one to which the individual might aspire through the medium of education. As Lehman et al (2004) points out, agency can be exercised as an individual or a social phenomenon. In the Confucian scheme, it is the latter. Indeed, when asked to characterise “achievement”, contemporary Chinese respondents create categories in which individualistic and affiliative characteristics are positively correlated, while US respondents create categories in which these two are negatively correlated (Salili, 1997).
Against this context, it is argued that the triumphs of the Greeks in logic and science are only to be expected. In Chinese philosophy, there did not emerge the same traditions of abstraction. These are less easily entertained in a world that was thought to be ever changing. Moreover, their world was characterised by contradictions: although these were generative, rather than (as they were for the Greeks) obstructive and needing to be disposed of. This lack of interest in abstracting and finding the essence of things is reflected in the Chinese language as is exists today. There is no adjectival suffix that matches the English formulation “-ness”. Properties such as “boldness” or “brightness” are only understood in terms of their adherence to particular things. Accordingly, language is more given to representing qualities in terms of metaphors, rather than closely defined abstract terms.
Clearly, these different philosophical traditions could imply different orientations towards the task of learning. Lehmann et al (2004) express the contrasting dispositions for learning around matters of defining the self: “An ideal Socratic learning derives self-respect from the actualization of ones potentials for independent learning, whereas an ideal Confucian learning derives self-respect from moral self-transformation and from pursuits of prosocial goals.” Thus Chinese learners might be expected to contrast with those from Western peers in terms of motive and receptivity towards particular systems of analytic reasoning and description.
This historical framework suggests two questions. The first would concern the origin of these apparently robust but different traditions. It is not credible simply to locate far-reaching world views within the influence of two particular individuals – Socrates and Confucius. It must be presumed that those individuals were responding to (and articulating) something already existing within a society: something more pervasive and fundamental.
The second question would concern the continuity between these historically documented ways of living then and ways people are acting in a modern world. If psychological differences between East and West are apparent today we are certainly tempted to invoke influences from the past because the ecology of the present seems rather similar between the two worlds. Indeed, in comparing Chinese and European urban life, we notice environments that share a great deal of structure in common.
The first question (regarding the origins of these worldviews) is less pressing to our present concern but it is certainly interesting. Although not a comprehensive response, Nisbett has suggested that much is clarified by noticing the ecological and social differences that happened to be configured at these two geographical sites (Diamond, 1997). The ecology of ancient Greece was one of hills and mountains descending to the sea. This was an environment suitable for hunting, fishing and trade: a form of subsistence less dependent on social coordination and cooperation. China, on the other hand, comprised relatively flat, fertile and well-irrigated regions. Its ecology favoured agriculture and, thus, coordinating well with others. Its circumstances would have encouraged a relatively strong central government. In China the individual would more likely see themselves as embedded in a larger social order. Moreover, these nations differed greatly in their relationships with the rest of the world. Greece was a significant focal point for trade. It would have been ethnically diverse and comfortable with a variety of visitors to its society. This contact with variety would have created an interest in understanding the perspectives of others and a will to theorise those others as individual social actors.
There is a danger of tracing differences in psychological characteristics along a single trajectory of: ecology – economy – social structure – philosophy – cognition. This is attractive but inviting of “just-so” explanations that are difficult to authenticate. Nevertheless, there are commentators who have compellingly explored this analysis of unfolding influence (Nisbett, 2005). Yet a more crucial concern may be the second of our two final questions in this section: what has this history of philosophical preference got to do with psychological differences we may find today?
There may be sensible historical continuity here. And, therefore, it may help sharpen our perspective on Chinese learners to remain conscious of their philosophical traditions and ecological contexts. However, for fully theorising the Chinese learner, it is more urgent to investigate how these grand themes are now manifest in modern communities within and outside China. That will be our next step. In the following section, research will be summarised that explores and defines the nature of psychological differences, as they are observed within cross-cultural comparative study.
References
Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
Dien, A. S. (1997). Confucianism and cultural psychology: Comparing the Chinese and Japanese. Hayward, CA: California State University.
Lehman, D. R., Chiu, C., & Schaller, M. (2004). Psychology and culture. Annual Review of Psychology, 689-714.
Nisbett, R. E. (2005). The geography of thought: How Asians and westerners think differently - and why. London: Nicholas Brearly Publishing.
On, L.W. (1996). The cultural context for Chinese learners: conceptions of learning in the Confucian tradition. In Watkins D. A., Biggs J. (Eds.), The Chinese Learner. Hong Kong and Melbourne: CERC and ACER. 25-42.
Salili, F. (1997). Explaining Chinese students' motivation and achievement: A
sociocultural analysis. In M. L. Maehr & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Advances in motivation and achievement, 9, pp. 73-118. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Tweed, R. G., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Learning considered within a cultural context: Confucian and Socratic approaches. American Psychologist, 57, 89-99.