The Psychological differences between Easterners and westerners
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Introductory Questions
How do easterners and westerners tend to act and think differently? What do we mean by “The East” and “The West”?
Do you agree with Nisbett? (Western focus on taxonomy, isolated objects, logic, & form vs. Eastern focus on relationships, holistics, dialectics, & substance?)
Is there value in making general claims about groups of people?
How are western interpretations of eastern traditional practices (yoga, meditation, etc.) different than the original? And vice versa?
Geography of Thought
This page is mostly based on the book Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett, and several studies carried out by him and his team. Richard Nisbett is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was born in 1941, and he is heavily decorated in academia, an established psychologist.
Experiments in the Proposed Differences in Thinking Style
In one experiment, Developmental psychologist Liang-hwang Chiu showed American and Chinese children photos of a cow, a chicken, and grass; and asked whether the children would pair the cow with the grass or with the chicken.As it turns out, Nisbett and his team found that most easterns pair together the cow and the grass, while most westerners pair together the cow and the chicken.
In another experiment, Nisbett and his partners Li-jun Ji, Zhiyong Zhang compared US students with Taiwanese students by presenting them with three words - panda, monkey, banana. And asking them to indicate which two of the three were most closely related. Nisbet’s team found that Westerners tend to focus on taxonomy, categorizations. And for this reason, they tend to pair together the cows and chickens, and the pandas and monkeys because they are animals. Easterners, on the other hand, tend to focus on relationships. And for this reason, they are more likely to pair together the cow and the grass (because the cow eats the grass). They also found that Western children tend to learn nouns faster than verbs, while Asian children tend to learn verbs faster than nouns.
In another study, conducted by Developmental psychologists Anne Fernald and Hiromi Morikawa in 1993, researchers went to the homes of mothers with infants six, twelve, or nineteen months old. They presented a stuffed dog and pig and a car and a truck. They asked the mothers to play with the toys with their babies as they normally would. As it turned out, American mothers used twice as many object labels as Japanese mothers ("piggie," "doggie") whereas Japanese mothers engaged in twice as many social routines of teaching politeness norms (empathy and greetings, for example). An American mother's patter might go like this: "That's a car. See the car? You like it? It's got nice wheels."A Japanese mother might say: "Here! It's a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give this to me. Yes! Thank you." Nisbett writes, “Strange as it may seem to Westerners, Asians don't seem to regard object naming as part of the job description for a parent… American children are learning that the world is mostly a place with objects, Japanese children that the world is mostly about relationships.”
One of Richard Nisbett’s Japanese students, Taka Masuda, hypothesized that Asians typically view the world from a wide-angle lens, and westerners often have tunnel vision. He tested this by showing a series of colored underwater scenes to Japanese and American students. All scenes had at least one "focal" fish, who was larger, brighter, and faster-moving than anything else in the scene. “Each scene also contained some less rapidly moving animals, as well as plants, rocks, bubbles, etc.”
When asked about what they had seen, Masuda found that both easterners and westerners reported about an equal number of references to the focal fish. But Japanese students made 60% more references to background elements - including the water, rocks, bubbles, and inert plants and animals. Japanese students also made twice as many references to relationships involving inert, background objects, and perhaps most interestingly, the first sentences of the Japanese students were usually referring to the environment - for instance, “It looked like a pond.” Whereas the first sentence of American students were 3x as likely to refer to the focal fish.
Another experiment involved 3 objects: a wooden cylinder, a wooden triangle, and a metal cylinder. The wooden cylinder was labeled Dax. Participants were asked which one of the other two objects would they also label Dax. Cognitive psychologists Mutsumi Imae and Dedre Gentner found that, on average, across many trials with different objects, more than 2/3 of Americans called the metal cylinder a Dax, whereas more than 2/3 of Japanese people called the wooden triangle a Dax.
Anthropologists characterize the thinking style of East as “Eastern Dialecticism,” compared to “Western Formal Logic.” Dialecticism is any form of reasoning that finds harmony when presented with two contradictory Arguments. If you’re familiar with the work of Hegel, in western Dialecticism, there’s a focus on finding a synthesis between two contradictory arguments. But in Eastern dialecticism, there is no synthesis; rather there merely is an acceptance of two simultaneous contradictory truth claims.
There are four basic tenets of Eastern Dialecticism. First, The Tao, which refers to the goal is knowing “The Way,” (The Tao) in order to find harmony with the Environment and with the community. Second, Change. Reality is a process of change and what is currently true will soon be false. Third, Contradiction. Because change is constant, contradiction is also constant. It’s ok that things are one way today and will be different tomorrow. Lastly, Relationship. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Parts are meaningful only in relation to the whole. In the words of Richard Nisbett, “Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states.”
In Western Formal Logic, the goal is not to live harmoniously with nature or the community. It is knowing and discovering the Truth. As compared to Eastern Dialecticism which embraces contradiction, Western Formal Logic embraces Non-contradiction. A and not-A can’t both be the case. Nothing can be and not be at the same time. As compared to Eastern Dialecticism which embraces Change, Western Formal Logic embraces Identity, A=A. Whatever is, is. A is itself and not some other thing. There is Middle-Exclusion; that is, everything must either be A or not-A. Nothing in Western Formal Logic can be partially A.
These are simplifications and gross generalizations, but they are intended to highlight the differences between the two thinking styles. Sometimes generalizations can be useful. However, this is all muddied by an increase in globalization in the last 50 years. More westerners picking up the eastern worldview, and more easterners picking up the western worldview. What we’re analyzing here, though, is the traditional culture.
Origins of Thought
Why are there these major differences in the way that easterners and westerners tend to view the world? Richard Nisbett and his team offer an explanation. And its roots take us on a journey back to Ancient China during the Han dynasty and to Ancient Athens.
Even today, most of the east is a kind of synthesis of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Different countries, of course, have a different mixture of these three, and to different intensities. These three teachers are collectively referred to as either “the three teachings” or “the three vinegar tasters”: Laozi (601-531 BCE) - Taoism, Confucius (551–479 BCE) - Confucianism, and The Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama (563-483 BCE) - Buddhism. All three of them come from the warring states period, right around the sixth to fifth century BCE, so about 2,600 - 2,500 years ago.
Now, amazingly, in the west, around the same time, we find three figures who’ve shaped much of western culture. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, referred to collectively as “The Big Three”. What was in the water at this time that allowed these 6 great-grandfathers of eastern and western culture to all live within 150 years of each other?
Differences in Geography
Richard Nisbett in “Geography of Thought” lays out a very thorough argument about the origins of the culture and mindset of the east and west. First, we need to consider the geography of ancient China during the Han dynasty 2600 years ago. There were large, vast, open plains with rivers flowing through them. Food production relied primarily on rice cultivation. Now, in order to cultivate wet rice, it's extremely beneficial to have big groups of people all working in little pieces of the plot. This required large-scale cooperation. It was only possible to cooperate on such large scales because of how vast the rolling hills were on which they worked.
Nisbett compares this to the agriculture of Athens, the bedrock of western culture. Instead of wide open plains, the geography of Athens is mostly mountain and the sea. Because of this, the food production was not on large-scale rice production or large-scale farms or large-scale anything. Mostly the food production was through hunting, herding, fishing, and small-scale olive and green production. None of these require large-scale cooperation. You can be an individual olive or grain farmer. You can be an individual hunter, an individual's herder, or fisher. So Ancient Athenians didn't require the kind of communal living that we tend to associate with the East. That's one important point.
Homogeneity of Ancient CHinese
The other important point that Nisbett focuses on is that the Han dynasty was incredibly homogeneous. At this time, it was more than 95% Han Chinese. This means that people would go an entire lifetime without ever interacting with someone who wasn't Han Chinese. Because of this, they had little contact with radically different world views. They were interacting almost exclusively with people who spoke the same language, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, had the same values, etc. They had the same wedding ceremonies and the same kinds of funerals. They held the same beliefs about morals and the afterlife. All was basically the same. Because of this, people weren't really debating. Everyone believed mostly the same thing, so there was little need for debate. The incentive for a philosophical inquiry wasn’t, as compared to the west, to find the “Truth”. It was to maintain harmonious social relationships. Nisbett argues that because of the wet rice cultivation and working in these large-scale farms, it was incredibly important, even necessary that people have really harmonious living, and that we put the group ahead of the individual. We can compare this to the heterogeneity of the west.
Heterogeneity of Ancient Greek
Now, in contrast, at the time Ancient Athens was incredibly heterogeneous. Its primary economy was maritime, focused on trading with other countries and nation-states. Tradesmen would get on a boat and arrive in a different land, different city, different country. A place with very different customs. They were frequently interacting with radically different ideas, people who had different gods, people who ate different foods and prepared it in different ways, who wore different clothing, spoke a different language, who had different value sets, who had different expectations about what polite is, how manners are supposed to be. With so many different and conflicting ideas, which one is the right one? This is why the Ancient Athenians relied heavily on debate. To find “the Truth”, They would look at different cultures and say “Okay, well whose god is the best? Whose food is the best? Whose way of managing the economy, whose way of arranging the government is the best?” This heterogeneity also caused something that was very uniquely western according to Nisbett: the ability to abstract.
Abstraction
These frequent interactions with diverse, conflicting cultures forced abstraction for survival in the maritime Greeks. On their expedition, interacting with another culture, one might say, “I believe in the god Zeus, but you believe in the god Zarathustra. Even though your god is different from my god, maybe we can say that there's something similar about our gods. We can invent a new word - let's call it “godliness,” an abstract principle describing the characteristics of a God. One which can apply to all gods. It doesn't have to be one particular god. It can be this abstracted idea.
In fact, one of the most famous philosophical theories coming out of this time is Plato's "Theory of the Forms.” Plato said, basically, “yeah there's this chair and there's that chair and there's that chair. But there is the Realm of the Forms where the True Chair exists. And all of these chairs that we see with our eyes, these are merely manifestations, replications, reflections, shadows of the one True Chair.”
This is a fundamental ability, Nisbett's and his team assert, that so substantially distinguishes the West from the East. However, the ability to abstract is not necessarily a good thing, but it does lead to some extreme differences in culture.
Athenians developed the ability to add the suffix “-ness” to the end of basically any word. They could change any adjective to a noun by adding “-ness”. The green of limes and the green of olives can just become “green-ness” and eventually this becomes just “green”. With abstractions, we can look at one kind action that a person does, and one kind action that another person does, and we can abstract the commonalities. And we can call these actions Kingliness or Godliness.
In Ancient Eastern culture, according to Nisbett, these kinds of abstract words did not exist. He writes: “There is the whiteness of the horse or the whiteness of the snow in ancient Chinese…, but not whiteness as an abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything.”
Discussion Questions
Do you want to cultivate more of an eastern or western worldview? Why?
Which are more real - abstracts or objects?
How do eastern and western philosophy differ?
How are relationships with social media different in the east and the west? Why?
How much is your worldview shaped by language?
How has globalism impacted the tradition of communalism in the east and individualism in the west?
Proposed Cultural Outcomes
So how do these differences between ancient cultures actually apply today. How these two opposing systems of ancient thought may account for modern differences in philosophy, medicine, science, and psychology.
Philosophy
First, let us explore philosophy. In Eastern Philosophy, the search is for harmony and practicality. And this is likely because so much of their lives depended on strong community. They didn't have much of a debating tradition and instead focused on dialecticism - the idea that people can believe different things simultaneously, and it’s fine. We can believe in contradictory things. We don't have to prove that I’m right and you're wrong, instead we can hold on to two different truths at the same time. Because of this, many of the arguments that are made in eastern philosophy tend to be “unfalsifiable”. i.e. There’s no conceivable evidence that can be given to disprove these arguments. For instance, Laozi might say something like: the value of a wheel is found in the distance between its spokes. There's clearly some wisdom here but there's literally nothing that could prove that Laozi's proposition here is wrong, therefore it's unfalsifiable. We also find that in Eastern Philosophy the conceptualization of the self tends to be only in relationship to others.
Now, let’s contrast this to Western Philosophy. In western philosophy, the search is for “the Truth.” It’s believed that the best path towards “this Truth” is via the use of abstract language. Much of the history of western philosophy is someone realizing that no book exists to describe an abstract concept, inventing a word, then writing a book defining that word. It was even believed that abstract ideas were in a way more real than things in this reality - a belief explored thoroughly in Plato’s Theory of the Forms. Numbers, for instance. We can take these three objects, and these three objects, and these three objects. We can apply the number three to all of them and in a way, the number three is more real than any of the three objects it represents.
There’s a very strong debating tradition in the west on this path towards “the Truth.” They followed formal logic. Following the principles of identity non-contradiction and middle exclusion, everything has to be one or the other. More importantly, the arguments of Western philosophers are mostly falsifiable. I.e. there is conceivable evidence that can disprove the claim. It’s possible to argue against Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel in ways that are impossible to argue against Confucius.
Medicine
Western Moral Philosophy also tends to focus on the Morality of the individual or the individual’s actions, rather than the Morality of the collective. We see similar trends in medicine. We find that western medicine tends to treat isolated areas. Western medicine employs surgeries that treat isolated areas, monofunctional pharmaceuticals that treat isolated areas. If you have pain in your liver, Western Doctors treat your liver, not your entire body, not your spirit, not your family, not your friends, not your house, not your meditation practice. They are going to treat the isolated areas. Traditional Eastern Medicine, on the other hand, tends to treat the body holistically, focusing on the whole body with acupuncture, diet, massage, meditation, social relationships, etc. There is a focus not on the isolated area but on the whole, and the interaction between all of the different areas.
Science
Now we can compare Eastern and Western sciences. Now, things here get a little blurred. Of course there's a modern, more western style of science in the east today, but when we look at traditional eastern sciences like astrology, the hindu sciences, yoga sciences, etc. There are actually strong differences.In most Western Sciences, we also find a concentration on isolated objects. There an organization of the world categorically and there are usually hypotheses that can be tested and verified and falsified. We can contrast this to Eastern traditional sciences where we find an emphasis on complexity and context, an organization of the world relationally, and few tests or falsifiable claims. What this means is that it's very easy in the west to learn about the knee, it's very easy to learn about one isolated thing. But if a westerner were to try to learn about astrology, there's a massive amount that they must learn about the context, about astrology in general before they can understand any piece of it. Same thing with Hinduism and 80 million gods. Same thing with yoga. There's so much to understand before getting there. There's not an easy entry point. That’s Nisbett’s main point here. Rather than organizing the world in terms of categories, there's much more of a focus on organizing the world in terms of relationships: relationships between different parts of the body, relationships between the soul and the self, the metaphysical world and the physical world etc. This complexity makes testing difficult.
Mathematics
In mathematics, western culture’s focus on abstracts has had an interesting impact. Researchers have found that skills in arithmetic develop at about the same speed in both easterners and westerners. But they find that in geometry, there's a much greater learning curve for most eastern learners. Nisbett postulates that it is because arithmetic is linked to objects. In arithmetic, we have five apples plus five apples equals ten apples. There are no variables. In geometry, however, there are variables. We find abstract equations like y = mx + b. Variables are abstract objects. Perhaps later on easterners excel at mathematics far beyond Westerners. But in the realm of geometry, Nisbett and his team found that Westerners learn the concepts much more quickly, and posits that this is because abstracts are already a part of the culture in the west; whereas in the east, they are not.
Behaviour
Now, the ways that easterners and westerners tend to analyze human behavior. We're going to explore a bit more deeply on this topic. In the west, because of the focus on isolated objects, behavior tends to have an individual cause. There's also an emphasis on internal and individual factors and individual responsibility. Westerners tend to say “oh it's just one bad apple,” that the individual is the cause of the problem not the system, not the context. In the east, in comparison, there is belief that behavior has complex causes. There is an emphasis on both internal and external factors. The blame for any act an individual commits is believed to be rooted not just in the individual, but in their environment, so the whole group is held responsible.
For example, back in 1991 at the University of Iowa in the United States, there was a Chinese Physics student named Gang Lu shot his several faculty and students, then himself. This was in response to losing the awards competition. His scholarship and his ability to attend university were both riding on winning this competition. He appealed, but wasn’t successful. Gang Lu subsequently failed to obtain an academic job. So he killed his advisor, several other students and then himself. Now, this is a heartbreaking but interesting case to consider. Because this rampage was committed by a Chinese student who was at the time living in America, the case was reported in both Chinese and American newspapers. Let’s take a look at the ways this case was reported. What we find in American newspapers at the time was an explanation of behavior through a focus on internal individual cause, saying that the individual had a “very bad temper,” that there was a “sinister edge to his character.” They also blamed it on his attitude, saying that he had a “personal belief that guns were an important means to redress grievances.” They also blamed it on individual psychological problems, saying that he was “a darkly disturbed man who drove himself to success and destruction.” Now, let’s compare this to Chinese Newspapers. Here, we find an explanation of behavior through a focus on his relationships, saying that he “did not get along with his advisor,” that he had a "rivalry with [the] slain students,” and that he was isolated from the Chinese community. Chinese Newspapers also blamed his actions on external factors, saying that he was a “victim of the Chinese top student educational policy,” and recognizing the “availability of guns in the United States.”
Letter from Richard
When Real Talk Philosophy held its first event exploring Richard Nisbett’s book, Jon Dallas sent an email to Richard bluntly asking which he thought was “better,” eastern culture or western culture.
Richard responded, “… I think the facts are more favorable to Easterners than is apparent in my book. The Western cognitive virtues are relatively simple and straightforward and are readily learned by Easterners. The Eastern cognitive virtues are not so clear-cut and are more linked to socio-emotional attributes. They are therefore going to be difficult for Westerners to pick up.”
There's a lack of entry points in Eastern Culture, and you need to know the entire system as opposed to the ability to focus on an individual isolated object.
Discussion Questions
How are family, dating, sex, manners, politeness, roadways, and sacred spaces treated differently in the east and west?
Individualism, communalism - is one superior to the other?
Is western culture more easily adopted than eastern culture?
How does the eastern education system differ from the western?
What misunderstandings are likely to arise from the differences in eastern and western self-identity?
Do easterners and westerners differ biologically or culturally?
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