Does where you come from influence how you think?

We know that different cultures have different values – I’m thinking of Lee Kuan Yew talking about ‘Asian Values’ for Singapore and the region – but do our differences go beyond values? Do we, quite literally, see the world in different ways because of the way we think? Since I’m writing my thesis on how feelings affect behaviour in a Confucian-influenced environment, I wanted to learn more about how we think and therefore process our feelings.

First, a simple experiment. Look at the target flower in the image below and decide – does it belong to Group 1 or Group 2?

I asked this question in a mainly Singaporean and Malaysian-dominated app and the results were pretty definitive: 112 people thought that the flower belonged in Group 1 and 43 people thought it belonged to Group 2. This coincides with what the authors of the study found – when tested on three groups (Koreans, Asian Americans, and European Americans), “most of the Koreans thought the target object was more similar to the group on the left, whereas most of the European Americans thought the object was more similar to the group on the right.” In other words, the Koreans and other Asians consider the overall look of the flowers in each group and tend to put the target object in Group 1, while European Americans tend to find a categorisation rule (in this case, curved vs straight stems) and put the target object in Group 2.

This experiment is just one of the many mentioned in The Geography of Thought. Nisbett mixes history and social science experiments to illuminate the differences between East-Asian and Western thought. The subtitle rather broadly categorises things into “How Asians and Westerners think differently” but that is too much of a generalisation for me. The Asians that Nisbett focuses on are mostly Asians from countries influenced by Confucianism and Taoism, in other words, influenced by Chinese culture. This would include China, Japan, Korea, and in Southeast Asia, Singapore. The Westerners that Nisbett talks about are those who are influenced by Ancient Greek culture, which is to say, North Americans and Europeans. I think it’s important to make this distinction because while Confucianism cast a long shadow, it did not influence all Asian cultures – India, for example, strikes me as a country where we might not find the influence of Confucianism, though it did influence China through the introduction of Buddhism. I also didn’t see much on the Middle East as well as the Latin American countries (and perhaps Eastern European as well? I’m not sure but I suspect they might have had a slightly different cultural influence as well).

For the rest of my review, I’ll refer to “Asian” as “East Asian” and Western as “Anglo-Western” just to be slightly more accurate and so I don’t feel like I’m overgeneralising and dividing the world into two when there are probably a few other large groups we should be considering.

The book starts with an overview of the historical and cultural influences of East Asia and Anglo-Western thought, namely Ancient Greek and Chinese culture, before looking at aspects of how we view the world, such as whether we look at the background or a focal object first, what we think about stability vs change, interdependent vs independent societies, and how societal values can affect behaviour. There is, as you may expect, a lot of information in these chapters. While some of the information, such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, were things I’d learnt about, others were new. Three nuggets of information that caught my attention:

• Societal cues can influence behaviour – you may be raised in an independent society, but live long enough in an interdependent society and your behaviour may change. We can also be primed to act in independent or interdependent ways
• Females of both East-Asian and Anglo-Western cultures tend to be more holistic in their orientation than males, but experiments conducted by social scientists find that “gender differences are always small than the cultural differences.”
• There are two types of bilinguals: coordinate bilinguals, people who learn a second language relatively late in life, and compound bilinguals, who learn their second language early. As you might expect, the language you test coordinate bilinguals in does affect their response (an example of how language can affect thought) but for compound bilinguals, the language used in tests does not matter. In fact, for compound bilinguals from Hong Kong and Singapore, their groupings shifted in a Western direction, with a weaker preference for relationships over taxonomic grouping. The book did not talk about it, but I wonder if this shift towards a Western-style of thought is, for Singaporeans, due to the fact that most of us learn English as a first language and consume most of our media in English as well.

Although I think this book is not perfect, given my misgivings about how broadly the term “Asians” has been applied, I think it’s a valuable work. Too often, people writing in English tend to assume that others think the way they do. I’m currently reading a book called The Insta-Food Diet; it’s about how social media is shaping what we eat and how we eat, and it’s very obvious that the author has defaulted to a Western, specifically American, worldview and thinks that it’s universal. One thing that stood out to me was her talking about the “medicine as food” movement – she was very clear that she cannot see food as medicine and that medicine is medicine. This was pretty weird for me because the Chinese way of thinking of the body is a lot more holistic and we quite naturally change our diet when sick, in other words, foods as medicine (in conjunction with pills/syrups). A friend of mine also pointed out that a lot of the medicine we get is derived from plants that we also eat, so it’s strange to separate medicine from food completely.

It’s so easy to fall into what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” which is why it’s important for us to be concious of the fact that other people don’t just have different backgrounds from us, they can also think and see the world differently. Reading stories from other cultures is an amazing way to broaden our worldview, and I think books like The Geography of Thought can also be very helpful in this endeavour.