[lit-ideas] Re: News via the web
- From: "Mirembe Nantongo" <nantongo@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2004 12:19:24 -0500
A review of the Nisbett book Andreas cites can be found below. It certainly
does sound fascinating. Question for John: what are the newspapers like in
Japan? Does straight reporting tend to be written as it is here -- ie make it
short, summarize the story at the beginning, add the detail later for the
reader to take or leave -- or do articles tend to be much longer than an
average report in a U.S. paper with important points sometimes appearing for
the first time deep within the body of the article? What about newspaper
layout? Are the pages broken up into what we would consider visually manageable
chunks using headlines and graphics, or are there vast stretches of
closely-printed type largely devoid of graphics? I'm trying to get used to
Arabic newspapers -- it's completely different ground and seems to be catering
to a very different kind of thinking, and I don't mean political thinking. My
current simplest impressions are that the average reader of Arabic newspapers
has both more time and is better at sustained mental focus than the average US
reader of English newspapers, but am open to contradicting or additional ideas.
Best, MN
http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2003/Feb03/r022703a.html
The geography of thought: How culture colors the way the mind works
ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Cultural differences in the way the mind works may be greater
than most people suspect, according to University of Michigan psychologist
Richard Nisbett, author of "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners
Think Differently...and Why," just published by The Free Press. "When you have
a diverse group of people from different cultures, you get not just different
beliefs about the world, but different ways of perceiving it and reasoning
about it, each with its own strengths and weaknesses," says Nisbett, a senior
research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world's
largest academic survey and research organization.
In the book, Nisbett, who also heads the U-M Culture and Cognition Program,
discusses the substantial differences in East Asian and Western thought
processes, citing experimental, historical, and social evidence. His findings
call into question the long-standing psychological assumption that the way the
human mind works is universal. In the process, he addresses such questions as:
· Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry?
· Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the
other way around in East Asia?
· Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its
surroundings?
"East Asian thought tends to be more holistic," says Nisbett, who also heads
the U-M Culture and Cognition Program. "Holistic approaches attend to the
entire field, and make relatively little use of categories and formal logic.
They also emphasize change, and they recognize contradiction and the need for
multiple perspectives, searching for the 'Middle Way' between opposing
propositions.
"Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the
categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to
explain and predict its behavior."
In study after study described in the book, Nisbett and colleagues from China,
Korea, and Japan have found that East Asians and Americans responded in
qualitatively different ways to the same stimulus situation. In one experiment,
designed to test whether East Asians are more likely to attend to the whole
while Westerners are more likely to focus on a particular object within the
whole, Japanese and Americans viewed the same animated underwater scenes, then
reported what they had seen.
"The first statement by Americans usually referred to a large fish in the
foreground," says Nisbett. "They would say something like, 'There was what
looked like a trout swimming to the right.' The first statement by Japanese
usually referred to background elements: 'There was a lake or a pond.' The
Japanese made about 70 percent more statements than Americans about background
aspects of the environment, and 100 percent more statements about relationships
with inanimate aspects of the environment, for example, that a big fish swam
past some gray seaweed."
In another experiment described in the book, Nisbett and colleagues found that
Americans respond to contradiction by polarizing their beliefs whereas Chinese
respond by moderating their beliefs. In still another study, the researchers
found that when making predictions about how people in general could be
expected to behave in a given situation, Koreans were much more likely than
Americans to cite situational factors rather than personality characteristics
as reasons for someone's behavior.
Social practices and cognitive processes support or "prime" one another,
Nisbett points out. For example, "the practice of feng shui for choosing
building sites may encourage the idea that the factors affecting outcomes are
extraordinarily complex," he notes, "which in turn encourages the search for
relationships in the field. This may be contrasted with the more atomistic and
rule-based approaches to problem-solving characteristic of the West. Consider,
for example, the nature of approaches to self-help in the West: 'The Three
Steps to a Comfortable Retirement' or 'Six Ways to Increase Your Word Power.'"
According to Nisbett, Asians move radically in an American direction after a
generation or less in the United States. "But it might be a mistake to assume
that it's an easy matter to teach one culture's tools to individuals in another
without total immersion in that culture," he says.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 11:52 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: News via the web
> > Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 2004) at
> http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/2/beckerman-iraq.asp
>
> > The conversation just kept on leaping around without any rational back and
> forth. Many of the Iraqis he talked to had a hard time developing clear
> arguments, explaining themselves fully, and, as Packer put it, understanding
> their own situation. Packer thinks this might be related to the fact that
> the Iraqis were isolated and denied free will for so long. A psychiatrist
> whom Packer quoted in the article explained that Iraqis lack the power to
> experience freedom.
>
> This is so silly! Those reporters simply have no idea what it is like to
> live outside of their own country. They can be in Europe for ten years and
> they're still in the USA.
>
> There is a fascinating book: Geography of Thought, by Richard Nisbett, that
> explores the differences in the way Americans and Asians think, perceive,
> and express themselves.
>
> yrs,
> andreas
> www.andreas.com
>
>
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