Because individual self-reliance was the key to success: These differences remain widespread today. If you show an Asian student a cartoon of a fish tank and track their saccades by the millisecond, they unconsciously scan the entire scene, while their Western counterpart focuses more on the dominant, individual, brightly coloured fish at the front. Ask what they saw and the Asian description is more likely to begin with the context – ‘I saw a tank’ – compared to the Westerner’s individual object – ‘I saw a fish’. Ask what they thought of that singular fish and the Westerner is likely to say
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