Asians and Westerners Think Differently …

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 In Korean, the sentence “Could you come to dinner?” requires different words for “you,” which is common in many languages, but also for “dinner,” depending on whether one was inviting a student or a professor. Such practices reflect not mere politeness or self-effacement, but rather the Eastern conviction that one is a different person when interacting with different people.

“Tell me about yourself” seems a straightforward enough question to ask of someone, but the kind of answer you get very much depends on what society you ask it in. North Americans will tell you about their personality traits (“friendly, hard-working”), role categories (“teacher,” “I work for a company that makes microchips”), and activities (“I go camping a lot”). Americans don’t condition their self-descriptions much on context. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean self, on the other hand, very much depends on context (“I am serious at work”; “I am fun-loving with my friends”). A study asking Japanese and Americans to describe themselves either in particular contexts or without specifying a particular kind of situation showed that Japanese found it very difficult to describe themselves without specifying a particular kind of situation—at work, at home, with friends, etc. Americans, in contrast, tended to be stumped when the investigator specified a context—“I am what I am.” When describing themselves, Asians make reference to social roles (“I am Joan’s friend”) to a much greater extent than Americans do. Another study found that twice as many Japanese as American self-descriptions referred to other people (“I cook dinner with my sister”).

When North Americans are surveyed about their attributes and preferences, they characteristically overestimate their distinctiveness. On question after question, North Americans report themselves to be more unique than they really are, whereas Asians are much less likely to make this error. Westerners also prefer uniqueness in the environment and in their possessions. Social psychologists Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus asked Koreans and Americans to choose which object in a pictured array of objects they preferred. Americans chose the rarest object, whereas Koreans chose the most common object. Asked to choose a pen as a gift, Americans chose the least common color offered and East Asians the most common.

It’s revealing that the word for self-esteem in Japanese is serufu esutiimu. There is no indigenous term that captures the concept of feeling good about oneself. Westerners are more concerned with enhancing themselves in their own and others’ eyes than are Easterners. Americans are much more likely to make spontaneous favorable comments about themselves than are Japanese. When self-appraisal measures are administered to Americans and Canadians, it turns out that, like the children of Lake Wobegon, they are pretty much all above average. Asians rate themselves much lower on most dimensions, not only endorsing fewer positive statements but being more likely to insist that they have negative qualities. It’s not likely that the Asian ratings merely reflect a requirement for greater modesty than exists for North Americans. Asians are in fact under greater compunction to appear modest, but the difference in self-ratings exists even when participants think their answers are completely anonymous.

It isn’t that Asians feel badly about their own attributes. Rather, there is no strong cultural obligation to feel that they are special or unusually talented. The goal for the self in relation to society is not so much to establish superiority or uniqueness, but to achieve harmony within a network of supportive social relationships and to play one’s part in achieving collective ends. These goals require a certain amount of self-criticism—the opposite of tooting one’s own horn. If I am to fit in with the group, I must root out those aspects of myself that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult. In contrast to the Asian practice of teaching children to blend harmoniously with others, some American children go to schools in which each child gets to be a “VIP” for a day. (In my hometown a few years ago the school board actually debated whether the chief goal of the schools should be to impart knowledge or to inculcate self-esteem. I appreciated a cartoon that appeared at about the same time showing a door with the label “Esteem Room.”)

Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. This stance of perfectionism through self-criticism continues throughout life. Sushi chefs and math teachers are not regarded as coming into their own until they’ve been at their jobs for a decade. Throughout their careers, in fact, Japanese teachers are observed and helped by their peers to become better at their jobs. Contrast this with the American practice of putting teachers’ college graduates into the classroom after a few months of training and then leaving them alone to succeed or not, to the good or ill fortune of a generation of students.

An experiment by Steven Heine and his colleagues captures the difference between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement. The experimenters asked Canadian and Japanese students to take a bogus “creativity” test and then gave the students “feedback” indicating that they had done very well or very badly. The experimenters then secretly observed how long the participants worked on a similar task. The Canadians worked longer on the task if they had succeeded; the Japanese worked longer if they failed. The Japanese weren’t being masochistic. They simply saw an opportunity for self-improvement and took it. The study has intriguing implications for skill development in both the East and West. Westerners are likely to get very good at a few things they start out doing well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades. 

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IS IT LANGUAGE THAT DOES THE JOB?

Given the substantial differences in language usage between Easterners and Westerners, is it possible that it is merely language that is driving the differences in tendency to organize the world in terms of verbs vs. nouns? Are the findings about knowledge organization simply due to the fact that Western languages encourage the use of nouns, which results in categorization of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, with the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized? More generally, how many of the cognitive differences documented in this book are produced by language?

There are in fact a remarkable number of parallels between the sorts of cognitive differences discussed in this book and differences between Indo-European languages and East Asian languages. The parallels are particularly striking because East Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, are themselves so different in many respects, yet nevertheless share many qualities with one another that differentiate them from Indo-European languages.

In addition to the practices already discussed—pointing and naming, location of verbs in sentences, marking of nouns as generic, and so on—there are several ways in which language usage maps onto differences in category usage.

The Western concern with categories is reflected in language. “Generic” noun phrases are more common for English speakers than for Chinese speakers, perhaps because Western languages mark in a more explicit way whether a generic interpretation of an utterance is the correct one. In fact, in Chinese there is no way to tell the difference between the sentence “squirrels eat nuts” and “this squirrel is eating the nut.” Only context can provide this information. English speakers know from linguistic markers whether it is a category or an individual that is being talked about.

Greek and other Indo-European languages encourage making properties of objects into real objects in their own right—simply adding the suffix “ness” or its equivalent. The philosopher David Moser has noted that this practice may foster thinking about properties as abstract entities that can then function as theoretical explanations. Plato actually thought that these abstractions had a greater reality than the properties of objects in the physical world. This degree of theorizing about abstractions was never characteristic of Chinese philosophy.

East Asian languages are highly “contextual.” Words (or phonemes) typically have multiple meanings, so to be understood they require the context of sentences. English words are relatively distinctive and English speakers in addition are concerned to make sure that words and utterances require as little context as possible. The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has shown that middle-class American parents quite deliberately attempt to decontextualize language as much as possible for their children. They try to make words understandable independent of verbal context and to make utterances understandable independent of situational context. When reading to a child about a dog, the parent might ask the child what the animal is (“A doggie, that’s right”) and who has a dog (“Yes, Heather has a dog”). The word is detached from its naturally occurring context and linked to other contexts where the word has a similar meaning.

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. There must be a subject even in the sentence “It is raining.” Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are “topic-prominent” languages. Sentences have a position, typically the first position, that should be filled by the current topic: “This place, skiing is good.” This fact places an alternative interpretation on our finding that, after viewing underwater scenes, Americans start with describing an object (“There was a big fish, maybe a trout, moving off to the left”) whereas Japanese start by establishing the context (“It looked like a pond”). While not obligatory from a grammatical standpoint, an idiomatic Japanese sentence starts with context and topic rather than jumping immediately to a subject as is frequently the case in English.

For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces. Languages capture this different sort of agency. Recall that there are many different words for “I” in Japanese and (formerly, at any rate) in Chinese, reflecting the relationship between self and other. So there is “I” in relation to my colleague, “I” in relation to my spouse, etc. It is difficult for Japanese to think of properties that apply to “me.” It is much easier for them to think of properties that apply to themselves in certain settings and in relation to particular people. Grammar also reflects a different sense of how action comes about. Most Western languages are “agentic” in the sense that the language conveys that the self has operated on the world: “He dropped it.” (An exception is Spanish.) Eastern languages are in general relatively nonagentic: “It fell from him,” or just “fell.”

A difference in language practice that startles both Chinese speakers and English speakers when they hear how the other group handles it concerns the proper way to ask someone whether they would like more tea to drink. In Chinese one asks “Drink more?” In English, one asks “More tea?” To Chinese speakers, it’s perfectly obvious that it’s tea that one is talking about drinking more of, so to mention tea would be redundant. To English speakers, it’s perfectly obvious that one is talking about drinking the tea, as opposed to any other activity that might be carried out with it, so it would be rather bizarre for the question to refer to drinking.

According to linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the differences in linguistic structure between languages are reflected in people’s habitual thinking processes. This hypothesis has moved in and out of favor among linguists and psychologists over the decades, but it is currently undergoing one of its periods of greater acceptance. Some of our evidence about language and reasoning speaks directly to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Recall that Li-jun Ji, Zhiyong Zhang, and I examined whether language per se affects the way people categorize objects. We gave word triplets (for example, panda, monkey, banana) to Chinese and American college students and asked them to indicate which two of the three were most closely related. The Chinese students were either living in the U.S. or in China and they were tested either in English or in Chinese.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, then it ought to make a difference which language the bilingual Chinese are tested in. They should be more likely to prefer relationships (monkey, banana) as the basis for grouping when tested in Chinese and more likely to prefer taxonomic category (panda, monkey) when tested in English. But there are different ways of being bilingual. Psycholinguists make a distinction between what they call “coordinate” bilinguals and “compound” bilinguals. Coordinate bilinguals are people who learn a second language relatively late in life and for whom its use is confined to a limited number of contexts. Mental representations of the world supposedly can be different in one language than in the other for such people. Compound bilinguals are people for whom the second language is learned early and is used in many contexts. Mental representations for such people should be fused, since the languages are not used for different functions or used exclusively in different settings. We tested both types of bilinguals. People from China and Taiwan could be expected to be coordinate bilinguals because they typically learn English relatively late and its use is confined mostly to formal school contexts. People from Hong Kong and Singapore would be more likely to be compound bilinguals because they learn English relatively early and use it in more contexts. In addition, these societies, especially Hong Kong, are highly Westernized.

If language makes a difference to understanding of the world because different languages underlie different mental representations, we would expect to find the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis supported: The coordinate bilinguals, at least, should group words differently when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. If language makes a difference because structural features of the language compel different thinking processes, then we might expect even the compound bilinguals to group words differently when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. And, of course, if language is not important to cognitive tasks such as our grouping one, then we would expect no effect of language for either group.

The results could not have been more unequivocal. First, there were marked differences between European Americans tested in English and coordinate Chinese speakers tested in Chinese, whether in China or in the U.S. Americans were twice as likely to group on the basis of taxonomic category as on the basis of relationships. Mainland and Taiwanese Chinese tested in their native language were twice as likely to group on the basis of relationships as on the basis of taxonomic category and this was true whether they were tested in their home countries or in the U.S. Second, the language of testing did make a big difference for the mainland and Taiwanese Chinese. When tested in English, they were much less likely to group on the basis of relationships. It thus appears that English subserves a different way of representing the world than Chinese for these participants.

But matters were quite different for compound bilinguals from Hong Kong and Singapore. First, their groupings were shifted in a substantially Western direction: They were still based on relationships more than on taxonomic category, but the preference was much weaker for them than for the coordinate Chinese and Taiwanese speakers. More importantly, it made precisely no difference for the compound speakers whether they were tested in Chinese or in English.

The results are clear in their implications. There is an effect of culture on thought independent of language. We know this because both the coordinate Chinese speakers and the compound Chinese speakers group words differently from Americans regardless of language of testing. The differences between coordinate and compound speakers also indicate a culture difference independent of language. The compound speakers from Westernized regions are shifted in a Western direction—and to the same extent regardless of language of testing. There is also clearly an effect of language independent of culture—but only for the coordinate speakers from China and Taiwan. They respond very differently depending on whether they are tested in Chinese or in English.

A tentative answer to the Sapir-Whorf question as it relates to our work—and it must be very tentative because we have just been discussing a couple of studies dealing with a single kind of mental process—is that language does indeed influence thought so long as different languages are plausibly associated with different systems of representation.

So there is good evidence that for East Asians the world is seen much more in terms of relationships than it is for Westerners, who are more inclined to see the world in terms of static objects that can be grouped into categories. Child-rearing practices undoubtedly play a role in producing these very different visions. East Asian children have their attention directed toward relationships and Western children toward objects and the categories to which they belong. Language probably plays a role, at least in helping to focus attention, but probably also in stabilizing the different orientations throughout life. There appears to be nothing about the structure of language, though, that actually forces description in terms of categories versus relationships.

As we will see next, the very different approaches to understanding the world don’t stop with the organization of knowledge. The decontextualization and object emphasis favored by Westerners, and the integration and focus on relationships by Easterners, result in very different ways of making inferences.

The Geography Of Thoughth How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why

RICHARD E. NISBETT