The Learner > Psychology
Cognition
Matters reviewed in the previous section identified the historical basis to culturally-correlated psychological variation: differences we tend to identify today on a somewhat intuitive or casual basis. Research outlined in the present section considers the credibility of such presumptions. We will identify here some typical studies that address these culturally-defined characteristics of people. Such research works to make such characteristics detectable through exploring how different people act in certain closely observed (even closely controlled) situations.
First, we may usefully identify a number of landmark academic contributions to this debate. This is work that seems to be a recurrent influence on researchers pursuing psychological differences arising within East-West comparisons. Despite criticism of psychological cross-cultural testing (e.g., Cole, 1996; Cole and Scribner, 1974), the work of Witkin and Berry (1975) remains highly influential. These researchers established the idea of a culture-neutral variety of cognitive test: a means for distinguishing analytic preferences within Western and Asian respondents. Moreover, the instrument did this in terms that seemed to resonate with common sense beliefs. In their rod-and-frame test, Witkin and Berry demonstrated differences in what they termed “field independence”: a perceptual capacity to position accurately an isolated object in a spatially elaborate surround. Performance on this task correlated with other psychological characteristics. Together, these characteristics seemed to crystallise out around notions of being more inclined to see people or things in terms of the contexts in which they were embedded. So, in research of this kind, Asian participants tend to be more “field dependent” in this sense.
Witkin and Berry therefore furnish an empirical paradigm that encouraged others to find similarly constrained tasks: activities that might help researchers define discrete psychological characteristics and focus in on them analytically – even measure the extent of their presence.
A conceptual psychological basis for pursuing this agenda is to be found in other publications of a landmark nature to this field. These must include the anthropological work of Triandis (1989, 1996). His research on contemporary social practices established a distinction between cultures that are “individualistic” versus “collectivist” in character. This widely-cited conception has been further elaborated by Markus and Kitayama (1991) in a highly influential article articulating their parallel distinction of “interdependence” and “independence”: a descriptive system that applies to cognitive, emotional and motivational aspects of psychological identity.
Finally, the practical dimension of these ideas was captured in the landmark work of Hofstede (1980, 1983), who addressed the significance of cultural differences in psychology for the conduct of modern business practices. Hofstede conducted research within the multi-national workforce of IBM. This created an interesting opportunity for research. The company furnished employees drawn from different cultural contexts, carrying out comparable duties, and for a shared employer: And yet within this situation Hofstede reports striking psychological differences between these cultural groups. The nature of these differences tended to endorse and elaborate the basic distinction identified above: the distinction between cultural contexts that fostered interdependent values and those that fostered independent values.
Psychological research in this area tends to consider people’s actions outside of the normal settings in which they may more typically act: for example, as teachers, learners, managers, parents, performers, and so on. This follows a preference in modern empirical psychology to abstract psychological characteristics from their contexts of expression. (Interestingly, this represents a form of analysis that, on the present account, would be associated with more Western mindsets. And, as it happens, such experimental psychology is more fully practiced in Western academic communities.)
This form of psychological research can be loosely divided among studies that focus on more interpersonal or social characteristics of individuals versus studies that focus on more cognitive or intellectual characteristics of individuals. Here, we shall only indicate the direction of findings, illustrating claims with a small number of representative empirical studies. A fuller review of research conducted in this tradition can be found in Nisbitt (2005).
The more collectivist disposition of Asian populations can be captured by simply asking members of such cultures to generate fictional narratives and, then, analysing their content. Domino and Hanah (1987) have reported such an exercise in which American and Chinese students were compared. The stories generated by Chinese participants revealed a greater orientation to the social world and more concern with ethical and moral issues that arise there.
This heightened orientation towards the social world surrounding one’s actions has been explored by researchers in a number of ways. In particular, it has underpinned the theorising of self concepts and of how individuals variously ascribe motive and intention to others.
Thus Triandis (1989) asked students from China and from the USA to complete statements of the general form “I am….”. The Chinese students were more likely to refer to collective conceptions of identity, particularly as these arose within the individual’s family. Kitayama, Markus and Lieberman (1995) show with similar methods how Western respondents are inclined to describe themselves in terms that suggest uniqueness of personality – a greater degree of individuality than might be justified. Asian respondents are less likely to self-describe in this way. Pratt (1991) has reviewed such differences in understanding of the self as they have been described for Chinese versus US populations.
These differences in perception of the self are complemented by differences in perception of the wider social world. The claim here relates to a broad observation already made: namely that heightened attention-to-context is a culturally-correlated dimension of psychological difference. Studies have been designed in which participants are invited to explain the observed behaviour of others. Asian participants are more likely to notice situational influences on action while Western participants are more likely to refer to personality traits of the actors. In general, this tendency to underplay the context as a source of influence – at the expense of highlighting essentialist properties of individuals – is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977). It has attracted a great deal of research and one influential strand of that work has established that Asian respondents are less vulnerable to the “error” invited within attributional tasks.
Finally, psychological differences in the social domain have been conceptualised by researchers in terms of the perception of status and authority. Hofstede (1986) suggests a dimension of culture difference that describes a contrast between “Power Distance” and “Individualism”. The former specifies the degree to which less powerful people in a society accept inequality in power, while Individualism specifies the extent to which individuals orient to their own personal interests. Hofstede’s cross cultural comparisons suggest that Chinese respondents display greater tendencies to the power distance dimension of the contrast and are thus more oriented towards hierarchical social structures.
Cultural correlates of more motivational characteristics have been approached in terms of reactions to feedback and the management of agency. Heine, Kitayama, Lehman, Takata, Ide, Lueng and Matsumoto (2001) have compared Japanese and US individuals in terms of their reaction to apparent failure in creativity tasks where further sustained action was possible. They report that the Asian participants worked longer and harder when they understood they had failed, while North American participants were deterred from further effort. The sample was not Chinese but the findings are used to reinforce a general claim about the understanding of task feedback in Asian societies. In those societies, success and failure are examples of polar terms that must be addressed in terms of harmony. So, the research findings just mentioned might be seen as a realisation of the much-quoted Chinese proverb “Failure is the mother of success”.
Differences in the management of personal agency have been considered in relation to Langer’s (1975) conceptualisation of the “illusion of control”. This is a state of mind in which the individual has a higher expectancy of personal success than the objective circumstances should realistically allow. For example, Langer demonstrated this in relation to irrational choices made by individuals who chose to find the possibility of agency in gambling situations that were clearly designed on the bases of chance and luck. In a series of studies, Ji, Peng and Nisbett (2000) show that Chinese research participants are far less vulnerable to this illusion of control and, accordingly, far more likely to see relevant co-variations in the components of a situation rather than assume their own agency over that situation.
Psychologists with a more cognitive orientation have sought the basis of these social differences in more fundamental aspects of functioning in perception, attention and cognition. “Cognition” here refers to matters of memory, reasoning, analysis and judgement. The idea of locating higher order social and motivational cultural differences in relation to low order cognitive processing differences has been very seductive. It encourages research designs in which individuals from different cultures are observed responding to perceptual and cognitive tasks that are relatively divorced from authentic cultural activities. This tradition, however, does include other research where ingenious designs of interpersonal exchange have been crafted for individuals to take part in.
Nisbett (2005) summarises a series of studies suggesting that Asian individuals tend to analyse the perceptual world more in terms of surface continuities rather than discrete objects set against grounds. He comments: “To the Asian, the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control. To the Westerner, the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood with undue reference to context, and highly subject to personal control.” (p. 100). Imai, Gentner and Uchida (1994) taught children a nonsense word in relation to objects in various shapes and made from various materials. Asian children were more likely to generalise the word on the basis of the shape rather than its substance: that is, they were attending to forms rather than objects in their semantic analysis of the perceptual field.
A number of other cognitive dispositions follow from recognising the contextualising nature of Asian perceptual analysis. For instance, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) found this for a memory task. Compared to Americans, Asian individuals had a better memory for objects when they were displayed for judgement against the same background contexts within which they were originally presented. Ji, Zhang and Nisbett (2004) have shown that monolingual Chinese individuals are more likely to categorise objects in relational or functional terms rather than the taxonomic categorising of Western individuals.
These reports of culturally-correlated differences in psychological functioning deserve to be taken seriously as complementary to various claims about the Chinese learner that will be addressed in following sections. However, there are a number of cautions that need to be applied to the research traditions summarised above.
First, it must be stressed that none of these findings are associated with a deficit model of psychological functioning. For example, there is no claim being made that cultural membership means that individuals simply do not have certain abilities (say of taxonomic classification or logical reasoning). The claims are about what people elect to do in interpreting certain situations: their “priorities” of perception, attention and analysis.
Second, the participants in this research are drawn from a wide range of cultures. Little attempt has been made to understand these differences at a finer level of granularity than “Asian” vs. “Western”. In other words, the nature of the claims are not closely mapped onto particular cultural groupings. Moreover, in the great tradition of psychological research, the participants are often students. Care is needed when generalising beyond these samples.
Third, there is rarely any attempt to address the question of whether a statistically significant difference in some activity represents a psychologically significant difference. Often, the effects reported are quite small (although statistically real) and the reader is left with little help in deciding whether they justify us speaking confidently of broad “cultural difference.”
Finally, it is necessary to revisit the nagging question of what creates and sustains the differences reported here: these distinctive characteristics of motivation, social perception and cognition. Earlier sections of this report indicate no more than a certain harmony between history and psychology: a certain consistency in the relationship between psychological characteristics and philosophical tradition. We turn next to aspects of contemporary cultural design – particularly child-rearing practices – that might clarify the origins of these differences in contemporary cultural life.
References
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