perceptions

a new study suggests that asians and north americans see things quite differently.

excepts:

Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene...

the reason for this?

"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it" (Richard Nisbett, co-author of the study).

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.

And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.

So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.

Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did.

so the obvious question is how about asian americans? or asians who grew up in the states?

Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural, he said, when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.

now i'm interested to see which group i fall under. or maybe i'm just an inbetweener.

"oh, hey, look... jessica alba is wearing a green dress and there is a guy wearing a blue shirt with light blue text holding a video camera behind her. this must be at some movie premiere. "

yeah, that's what i see when i'm looking at this picture.