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Westerners’ commitment to universally applied rules influences their understanding of the nature of agreements between individuals and between corporations.
to people from interdependent, high-context cultures, changing circumstances dictate alterations of the agreement.
We generally find that it is the white Protestants among the American participants in our studies who show the most “Western” patterns of behavior and that Catholics and minority group members, including African Americans and Hispanics, are shifted somewhat toward Eastern patterns.
The ancient Chinese philosophers saw the world as consisting of continuous substances and the ancient Greek philosophers tended to see the world as being composed of discrete objects or separate atoms.
for the Westerners, especially the Americans and the other people of primarily northern European culture, a company is an atomistic, modular place where people perform their distinctive functions. For the Easterners, and to a lesser extent the eastern and southern Europeans, a company is an organism where the social relations are an integral part of what holds things together.
Advertisements that emphasize nature have far more success in Asia than in the West. The Nissan corporation discovered this fact, to its chagrin, when it opened its advertising campaign for the Infiniti luxury car in the U.S. not with pictures of its automobile but with scenes of nature—often several expensive pages of nature scenes in a row—with just the name of the car at the end of the sequence. The campaign was a noted flop.
During the many decades that Anglo-American philosophers concerned themselves with atomistic, so-called ordinary language analysis, European philosophers were inventing phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.
Westerners are the protagonists of their autobiographical novels; Asians are merely cast members in movies touching on their existences.
A survey of Asians, Asian Americans, and European Americans found that feeling in control of their lives was strongly associated with mental health for European Americans, but much less so for Asians and Asian Americans.
Thus, to the Asian, the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather than 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 without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control. Very different worlds indeed.
it takes time to learn how to explain behavior in the culturally sanctioned way. Children in the two cultures didn’t differ in the sorts of explanations they gave. Not until adolescence did Indians and Americans begin to diverge in their explanations.
Americans regard personalities as relatively fixed and Asians regard them as more malleable. This is consistent with the long Western tradition of regarding the world as being largely static and the long Eastern tradition of viewing the world as constantly changing.
We tend to have two problems when we try to “predict” the past: (1) believing that, at least in retrospect, it can be seen that events could not have turned out other than they did; and (2) even thinking that in fact one easily could have predicted in advance that events would have turned out as they did.
Westerners’ success in science and their tendency to make certain mistakes in causal analysis derive from the same source.
despite their history of scientific-mindedness, Westerners are particularly susceptible to the Fundamental Attribution Error and to overestimating the predictability of human behavior.
there is direct evidence that Eastern children learn how to categorize objects at a later point than Western children.
The ancient Greeks were fond of categories and used them as the basis for discovery and application of rules. They also believed in stability and understood both the physical and social worlds in terms of fixed attributes or dispositions. These are not unrelated facts, nor is it a coincidence that the ancient Chinese were uninterested in categories, believed in change, and understood the behavior of both physical and social objects as being due to the interaction of the object with a surrounding field of forces.
There is the whiteness of the horse or the whiteness of the snow in ancient Chinese philosophy, but not whiteness as an abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything.
The obsession with categories of the either/or sort runs through Western intellectual history. Dichotomies abound in every century and form the basis for often fruitless debates:
distinction between “human” and “animal” insisted upon by Westerners made it particularly hard to accept the concept of evolution.
Throughout Western intellectual history, there has been a conviction that it is possible to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for any category.
East Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, are themselves so different in many respects, yet nevertheless share many qualities with one another that differentiate them from Indo-European languages.
East Asian languages are highly “contextual.” Words (or phonemes) typically have multiple meanings, so to be understood they require the context of sentences. English words are relatively distinctive and English speakers in addition are concerned to make sure that words and utterances require as little context as possible.
English is a “subject-prominent” language.
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are “topic-prominent” languages.
For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces. Languages capture this different sort of agency.
Most Western languages are “agentic” in the sense that the language conveys that the self has operated on the world: “He dropped it.” (An exception is Spanish.) Eastern languages are in general relatively nonagentic: “It fell from him,” or just “fell.”
According to linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the differences in linguistic structure between languages are reflected in people’s habitual thinking processes.
There is an effect of culture on thought independent of language.
there is good evidence that for East Asians the world is seen much more in terms of relationships than it is for Westerners, who are more inclined to see the world in terms of static objects that can be grouped into categories.
The decontextualization and object emphasis favored by Westerners, and the integration and focus on relationships by Easterners, result in very different ways of making inferences.
Chinese remain far more committed to reasonableness than to reason.
East Asians, then, are more likely to set logic aside in favor of typicality and plausibility of conclusions. They are also more likely to set logic aside in favor of the desirability of conclusions.
The Principle of Change The Eastern tradition of thought emphasizes the constantly changing nature of reality.
The Principle of Contradiction Because the world is constantly changing, oppositions, paradoxes, and anomalies are continuously being created.
The Principle of Relationship, or Holism As a result of change and opposition, nothing exists in an isolated and independent way, but is connected to a multitude of different things.
The American tendency to avoid contradiction seems related to the long-standing Western inclination to search for principles that will justify beliefs.
there is ample evidence to indicate that Easterners are not concerned with contradiction in the same way that Westerners are. They have a greater preference for compromise solutions and for holistic arguments and they are more willing to endorse both of two apparently contradictory arguments. When asked to justify their choices, they seem to move to a compromise, Middle Way stance instead of referring to a dominating principle.
East Asians could be expected to be more susceptible to the Barnum effect, accepting apparently opposing personality descriptions of themselves.
the simultaneous experience of conflicting emotions is more common for Easterners than for Westerners.
The difference in how hard children work at math is likely due at least in part to the greater Western tendency to believe that behavior is the result of fixed traits. Americans are inclined to believe that skills are qualities you do or don’t have, so there’s not much point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Asians tend to believe that everyone, under the right circumstances and with enough hard work, can learn to do math.
Asian superiority in math and science is paradoxical, but scarcely contradictory!
Chinese justice is an art, not a science.”
What is intrusive and dangerous in the East is considered a means for getting at the truth in the West.
Westerners place an almost religious faith in the free marketplace of ideas. Bad ideas are no threat, at least over the long run, because they will be seen for what they are if they can be discussed in public. There has never been such an assumption in the East and there is not today.
To the Western mind, once a bargain is struck, it shouldn’t be modified; a deal is a deal. For Easterners, agreements are often regarded as tentatively agreed-upon guides for the future.
For the Chinese, any conception of rights is based on a part-whole as opposed to a one-many conception of society. To the extent that the individual has rights, they constitute the individual’s “share” of the total rights.
It is the Abrahamic religions that have been so inclined toward religious warfare.
Cycles and recurrences are an integral part of many Eastern religions but are less common in the West. Rebirth is part of some Eastern religions but rare in Western ones.
You might say that as one moves West from India, the number of possible states after death lowers drastically—from the near infinity of reincarnations of Hinduism and Buddhism to the multiple levels of Catholic purgatory and circles of hell to the binary possibility of the Calvinist.
