{"id":2803,"date":"2005-09-01T16:05:15","date_gmt":"2005-09-01T15:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yummy-wakame.com\/archives\/2005\/09\/01\/westerners-and-easterners-see-the-world-differently\/"},"modified":"2005-09-01T16:05:15","modified_gmt":"2005-09-01T15:05:15","slug":"westerners-and-easterners-see-the-world-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/2005\/09\/westerners-and-easterners-see-the-world-differently\/","title":{"rendered":"Westerners and Easterners see the world differently"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article.ns?id=dn7882\" rel=\"external\"><strong>New Scientist:<\/strong><\/a> Chinese and American people see the world differently \u00e2\u20ac\u201c literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he says.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers tracked the eye-movements of two groups of students while they looked at photographs. One group contained American-born graduates of European descent and the other was comprised of Chinese-born graduate students who came to the US after their undergraduate degrees. Each picture showed a striking central image placed in a realistic background, such as a tiger in a jungle. They found that the American students spent longer looking at the central object, while the Chinese students&#8217; eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Nisbett. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Harmony is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on how things relate to the whole,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Nisbett. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In the West, by contrast, life is about achieving goals.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Nisbett also cites language development in the cultures. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To Westerners it seems obvious that babies learn nouns more easily. But while this is the case in the West, studies show that Korean and Chinese children pick up verbs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which relate objects to each other &#8211; more easily.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article.ns?id=dn7882\" rel=\"external\">Read the whole article.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Scientist: Chinese and American people see the world differently \u00e2\u20ac\u201c literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogalog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}