The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

Grossmann was surprised to find that the scores from Tokyo took a completely different pattern. There was no steep increase in age, because the younger Japanese were already as wise as the oldest Americans. Somehow, by the age of twenty-five, they had already absorbed the life lessons that only come to the Americans after decades more experience.51 Reinforcing Grossmann’s finding, Emmanuel Manuelo, Takashi Kusumi and colleagues recently surveyed students in the Japanese cities of Okinawa and Kyoto, and Auckland in New Zealand, on the kinds of thinking that they thought were most important at university. Although all three groups recognised the value of having an open-minded outlook, it’s striking that the Japanese students referred to some specific strategies that sound very much like self-distancing. One student from Kyoto emphasised the value of ‘thinking from a third person’s point of view’, for instance, while a participant in Okinawa said it was important to ‘think flexibly based on the opposite opinion’.52 What could explain these cultural differences? We can only speculate, but many studies have suggested that a more holistic and interdependent view of the world may be embedded in Japanese culture; Japanese people are more likely to focus on the context and to consider the broader reasons for someone’s actions, and less likely to focus on the ‘self’.53