Figure 9: Change blindness: Individuals from Eastern cultures tend to notice changes faster
How Does Development Shape the Way We See the World?
How could people from the East and West see the world so differently? One possibility is that brain plasticity enables the developing brain to encode relevant experiences to shape the way we see faces and hear languages. Nisbett believes that the same developmental process shapes the way we pay attention to things in the world. The world is full of complexity, ambiguity and missing information, ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion,’ as William James once wrote.68 We make sense of it by organizing the information into meaningful patterns. Much of this happens automatically as part of the package we inherit through our genes as the organizing brain processes that generate our perceptions. Sitting atop these built-in perceptual processes, is cognition – the higher order operations that guide perception.
Cognition organizes our thinking and gets better at this as we become more expert at noticing the regularities of the world and remembering them. This leads us to form expectations so that we can predict events. For example, if we know what to expect next from previous encounters, we can look out for familiar patterns. That’s why foreign games of sport can seem so disorganized to those unfamiliar with the rules.
In addition to our built-in rules for learning about the world, the most important source of expertise is other people. We have previously described how babies are tuned in to other people from the very beginning. Nisbitt believes that our early interactions with adults also shape the way we view the world. For example, Western and Eastern mothers interact and talk to their infants in different ways. US mothers are much more likely to engage in play that involves naming individual toys. Japanese mothers are more likely to engage their children in social games. In one study US and Japanese mothers were observed interacting with their children with the same toys.69 US mothers were twice as likely to label toys and focus the child’s attention on the attributes of each item. In contrast, Japanese mothers did label the object but they were much more likely to then engage the child with exchange games such as ‘I give it to you, now you give it to me’. Even the languages in these different cultures emphasize differently the individual- from the relational properties of items.70 This may explain why Eastern children are delayed in learning to sort objects into different categories compared to Western children who are comparatively more skilled at considering the properties of individual objects as opposed to grouping them together.
These differing ways of categorizing the world reflect the way that children can learn to adopt the prevalent social norms. But this learning is not set for life as are other critical-period phenomena. These ways of processing the world do not satisfy the biological imperatives that require hard-wiring. It seems unlikely that there are going to be significant permanent differences between individuals who view the world from collectivist or individualistic perspectives. More importantly these differing perspectives are easily reversible, suggesting that they are not cast in stone. For example, European/American students were asked to circle either independent pronouns (‘I’ or ‘mine’) or interdependent pronouns (‘we’ or ‘ours’). Those primed with independent pronouns gave higher endorsements to individualistic statements, whereas those primed with interdependence gave higher endorsement to collectivistic values.71 Clearly, such manipulations reveal that we are much more malleable to conforming to group norms rather than holding deep-seated notions about group and self-identity.
Also, if you prime Hong Kong residents who have grown up under the influence of both Western and Eastern cultural perspectives, you can shift their attitudes toward a collectivist perspective if you show them an image of the Chinese dragon, or shift them toward individualism with a picture of the US flag. In one study, groups of bicultural Hong Kong Chinese were primed with either Eastern or Western attitudes and then told about an overweight boy who cannot resist the temptation to gorge on food.72 They were then asked to rate how much of his weight problem was due to his own disposition and also how much was due to his social circumstances. Both groups were equal on rating the boy’s obesity as due to his own problems of self control, but those primed with the Chinese icons rated his situational circumstances significantly higher than those primed with the US flag.
Who Am I?
These studies reveal that the vast body of evidence undermines the notion of a core self, but rather supports the self illusion. If we are so susceptible to group pressure, subtle priming cues, stereotyping and culturally cuing, then the notion of a true, unyielding ego self cannot be sustained. If it is a self that flinches and bends with tiny changes in circumstances, then it might as well be non-existent. Most humans entertain some form of a self illusion, but it is one that is shaped by context. For many in the West, their self illusion is characterized by the individual fighting against the odds, whereas in the East, the most common form of the self illusion will be the team player. If these different types of selves were intrinsic, then they should not be so easily modified by context. Note that both ways of seeing the world, and more importantly one’s self illusion, require some form of public validation. Both require the presence of others.
It is worth pointing out a lesson to be learned. In this day and age where we increasingly need to share our limited living space on the planet, most people entertain a belief that they are considerate, reasonable and fair. Not many would readily accept that they are prejudiced, unreasonable and racist. However, we can easily harbour many stereotypes and distortions that shape the way that we behave and think. We are certainly more pliable through the influence of others than we ever thought. If we wish to be fair and just individuals, I think a good starting alternative is to accept that prejudice may be the norm, and not the exception, and is inherent in group psychology as Tajfel and others claimed. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging that you have one to begin with and so long as we entertain a self illusion, we are not going to accept just how much external circumstances have shaped us in the past and continue to exert an influence throughout our lives. We don’t see this because our cognitive dissonance is constantly shielding us from our failings by trying to maintain an integrated self belief – an idealized story of who we think we are.
Answer to Figure 9: There is a gorilla next to the pencils.
7
The Stories We Live By
I looked around, it was like a horror movie, people were mounted on each other, the smell of burnt skin and people’s insides was gagging. I kept thinking about my fiancé, about our wedding, I wanted to wear that white dress and swear my love for him. Something gave me the strength to get up. I believe today that it was my fiancé on his way to heaven.
Tania Head
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Who can forget the day they saw the attack on the Twin Towers? You didn’t even have to be there. It was the first live televised terrorist atrocity witnessed by the world. I was at work in Bristol, England, and recently had a television mounted on my office wall that I used to review research videos, but that afternoon I had it turned it on to watch the horror unfold on that crisp, sunny September morning in New York. It was surreal – it couldn’t be happening. I remember trying to be disconnected from it – as if it was just another piece of news. I did not want to think too hard about what I was seeing. And yet I will not forget that day. It is seared into the memories of all who witnessed the events that have simply become known as 9/11.