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1.1 Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Figure 1 Bananas in Pyjamas was an Australian children’s TV show depicting two Bananas, B1 and B2, who were almost identical in appearance and thinking. The bananas made sense of the events that arose in much the same way, so much so, that they were known for the phrases ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking B1?’ to which B1 says, ‘I am B2’.

If people’s brains made sense of all information in exactly the same way, the world would be a very monotonous place. People would be likely to process information about their surroundings in the same manner, meaning unique perspectives and novel thinking would not occur. This would drastically reduce the likelihood of scientific breakthroughs, the creation of works of art, and the world would be rather stagnant! Luckily, while thinking in itself is something that is common to everyone, people don’t actually make sense of the world in an identical way to others. Even B1 and B2 in Figure 1 demonstrated different thinking at times. Part of the reason for this is that there are many factors which influence the way our brains make sense of information. This course will focus on the influence of one of these factors: the influence of the cultures and societies that people live within.

To begin thinking about how culture might shape psychology, you will be introduced below to some research looking at how people perceive the world. This research compares people in the United States to people in East Asia (China, Japan and Korea). This is a very common comparison in this kind of research. This is because these two groups of people are seen as being the most different to each other in several ways that cultures are compared to each other. Comparing these two groups, therefore, is seen as a way to easily see how culture might be impacting the psychological process being studied. Now complete the first activity.

Activity 1

Look at the following image, then write a description in the box below about what you have seen.

Figure 2 A static example of the Michigan Fish Test from Masuda and Nisbett (2001).

Discussion

There are lots of ways you could have described the scene in the image. You may have started with a description of the fish in the foreground, noting their colour and size. Or you might have started by saying that it is an underwater scene, and noting the frogs, fish and seaweed. You may have also said that the frog is swimming away from the seaweed and that three of the fish are swimming towards it. The way in which you describe the scene may well be influenced by your culture.

Masuda and Nisbett (2001) showed the scene above to Japanese and US participants. Participants were shown a clip of the underwater scene and asked to report on what they saw. Japanese participants often started with information about the context, e.g. the background objects or environment and were more likely to report relationships between objects like ‘the frog is swimming away from the seaweed’. However, US participants were more likely to start by giving information about focal objects (e.g. moving fish and other animals) and to describe the physical appearance of the individual objects (e.g. ‘a big, brown and white fish’).

There was a second stage of the experiment that you were not shown. Here, the researchers changed the background to either a different seascape or no background at all. Japanese participants judged focal objects (e.g. the fish) more accurately when in the original background than when presented in a different underwater background or with no background at all. On the other hand, the changing backgrounds didn’t impact the performance of US participants.

The researchers understood this difference as showing that people from East Asia engage in ‘holistic’ thinking. This means that the objects or events are viewed as a whole and, when making sense of an object, the context and the object’s relationship with other objects in the visual field are considered. For example, in the experiment above, the Japanese participants processed moving objects (like the fish) with the environment or background objects, and their attention was distributed across the entire scene. In contrast, US participants seemed to process objects and events in isolation. This is often referred to as ‘analytical’ thinking (breaking things up into parts). For example, in Masuda and Nesbitt’s experiment, American participants were relatively unaffected by the changing background because they were focusing on the features of the fish in the foreground and weren’t paying as much attention to the background.

Masuda and Nisbett identified a difference in the ways that Japanese and US participants perceive the world around them, broadly as a whole defined by relationships or as a set of distinct objects. What’s interesting is that this distinction maps onto differences between how these two cultures tend to approach life more broadly.

A key cultural dimension on which different societies can be placed is the extent to which they are ‘individualist’ or ‘collectivist’. In individualist cultures, people are primarily concerned with the self, and this often takes precedence over the needs of the group to which they belong. People are often seen as independent from others and personal achievements are emphasised and valued. In contrast, collectivist cultures put greater emphasis on the importance of group harmony and success than on individual benefits and achievements. As you may have already guessed, it is rather unlikely that a culture or society can simply be categorised as one or the other. Instead, we can think of individualist and collectivist as sitting on two opposing ends of a continuum, where the US is close to the individualist end and China is close to the collectivist end.

Figure 3 A continuum of individualist vs collectivist cultural dimensions including placements of China, Mexico, Spain, Germany and the US.

Countries and cultures vary quite a lot on individualism and collectivism. As you can see in Figure 3, the US and China are at extreme ends of the scale. A lot of places are around the middle, and Northern European countries tend to be more individualist than Southern European countries.

Pause for thought

Take five minutes to review your response to Activity 1. Does your description align with the findings of Masuda and Nisbett (2001)? Did you focus on more holistic features of the scene (e.g. relationships between the fish and the background), or did you take a more analytical approach (e.g. describing individual features of the scene in isolation)? Think also about your own cultural background: is it more eastern, western, something in between or entirely different? Did the way you processed the scene fit with what Masuda and Nisbett found (e.g. if your cultural background is western, was your description more analytic; if your cultural background is eastern, was your description more holistic)?

Research like Masuda and Nisbett’s fish experiment has helped to establish that there are some differences in the way that people from different cultures see the world.

In the next section, you will learn a bit more about how some psychologists think these differences emerge. Do these different ways of perceiving the world happen because of the ways people learn to remember things, because of the environments they live in, or because of the language they grow up speaking? Or is it some combination of all of these?

◄Contents►Next: 1.2 Remembering around the world

OpenLearn - Psychology around the world
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