The East–West Thinking Gap and the Unconscious, According to Nisbett

Richard Nisbett is a social psychologist who spent a long career researching at the University of Michigan. In Korea he is widely known for the book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'... (note: the Korean original title is 'Thinking About Thinking'). He scientifically demonstrated East–West differences in perception and analyzed various social phenomena through many experiments. This lecture covers the East–West differences he studied over his life and how thinking works.

Nisbett holds that East Asians and Western Europeans have different ways of thinking. East Asians give much more weight to context than Westerners do, while Westerners tend to focus on the object itself rather than context.

East Asians are situation-centered: they react sensitively to the environment they belong to and value harmony over individual distinctiveness. Westerners are individual-centered: they try to control their environment, and as a result Americans find it easier than East Asians to cut off social ties.

Nisbett told the story of a Japanese friend who had lived in the US for a long time and came to love American party culture. The friend gathered Japanese people who liked parties and held one, but the result was a complete failure.

The core of an American dinner party is frank conversation. When someone says a certain video is funny, another person may bluntly argue that it isn't. For Japanese people, directly contradicting another's opinion is rude, so the party ended up dull.

An experiment was presented showing that in reasoning too, East Asians analyze holistically while Westerners analyze by focusing on the object. Students were shown speeches supporting marijuana legalization or a tuition increase, after being told in advance that the speakers were just saying what others had instructed them to say.

Even so, Americans believed the speaker's position was sincere, and Koreans likewise believed the speech was sincere. When the condition was changed so that supporters were shown directly on screen rather than just given as information, the results diverged. Americans still thought the speaker was sincere, while Koreans judged that the speaker's true feelings were different, understanding the relationship between speaker and instructor.

Nisbett concludes that East Asians understand the particularity of a situation better than Westerners do.

Summing up the lecture, Nisbett said the East focuses on grasping context and similarity of relationships, while the West focuses on grasping the object and on categories and rules. He attached a caveat, though: he was saying there is a tendency, not that 'East Asians are always like this and Westerners are always like that.'

He also added that people today are far more individualized than in the past.

Nisbett presented the relational principle of East Asian thinking as meaning that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and parts have meaning only within the whole.'

The East–West difference began very long ago and is tied not only to economic and cultural traits but also to ecological ones. China had wide river plains, so people inevitably had to cooperate with many others, and holistic thinking naturally developed as a result.

Greece, by contrast, was barren compared with China: sea and mountains lay close together, so trade and small private enterprises like small farms developed rather than large farms. Because large-scale cooperation with others was not required, analytic thinking became important.

Within China, both kinds of thinking coexisted. People in rice-farming regions, which needed much cooperation, excelled at holistic thinking, while people in wheat-growing regions, which were individual enterprises, tended toward object-centered thinking like the West.

In the East, when judging a criminal, the context of the crime is considered: why this person committed it and what environment they were in. In the West, context is barely examined; only the type of crime and the rules are considered, and the same rules are applied to everyone.

There is also a difference in contracts. In Japan, when heavy snow empties movie theaters, the film distributor is said to compensate the cinemas, which would be unthinkable in the West. A case was also presented in which Japan and Australia signed a five-year sugar supply contract at a fixed price, but sugar prices collapsed within six months. Japan asked Australia to lower the price, but Australia could not accept, and even raising the matter was itself controversial.

Nisbett says one cannot seriously rank which is better. Each has parts that are needed, so both holistic and analytic thinking are necessary.

He added, however, the observation that in theory it may be somewhat advantageous, because learning analytic thinking is easier.

When asked why they do something, people say they left it that way because it seemed like it should be left that way. Lee Sedol's 78th move in his match against AlphaGo was a move no one outside the venue had imagined, yet he himself said 'there was nowhere else to place it.'

Because it has become so familiar and is done unconsciously, it cannot be explained in words.

Through various experiments, Nisbett shows that we do not consciously access our cognitive processes. Much happens when we solve a problem, but we cannot look into the cognitive process itself.

When we calculate, see a distant object, or catch a ball flying toward us, we cannot accurately tell what actions we are performing. In the unconscious, we may be solving complex partial differential equations, but we do not know it. Nisbett closes the lecture by stressing that the unconscious influences our actions and judgments far more than we realize.

Judgments in court are not free from the influence of the unconscious either. Research has found that how harshly judges convict varies with the time of the hearing: sentences are relatively harsh before lunch and lighter after it. Hunger has exerted an influence on the unconscious.

Research has also found that people with baby-faced features are more likely to receive lighter punishments.

The unconscious does not only keep disrupting and distorting our thoughts. The process of creating something is likely to happen unconsciously. In Bruce Tuck's discussion of Gee Celly's 'The Process of Artistic Creation,' Celly collected essays from historically creative figures, and one can see that nearly all artists' creative work emerged unconsciously.

Mathematician Poincaré suddenly recalled the clue to a problem he had long been working on while on vacation and not thinking about mathematics at all. Paul McCartney of the Beatles heard a melody suddenly in a dream and composed 'Yesterday.'

The host raised the objection that the unconscious sounds like pseudoscience and makes us distrust our own judgments. In response, Richard Nisbett answers that knowing how the unconscious works makes us more careful, considering that what we think and do may be wrong.

"Once you know how the unconscious works, you can doubt other people's actions and thoughts. Even if that person has no intention to lie, you don't have to take everything they say at face value. The unconscious can create any part of our memories."

Nisbett sums up that our cognitive processes can contain errors and that the unconscious often operates on its own.

"Our cognitive processes can contain errors, and the unconscious often operates automatically. And to make use of it, we need to deliberately engage the unconscious."

Education matters greatly for intelligence too. In the US, children born through August enter school this year and those born from September enter the following year. Comparing the two at year's end, children born on August 31 had much higher IQs than those born on September 1. "As children went through school, their IQs gradually increased."

Through this study, Nisbett shows that school education contributes to raising intelligence.

Old games like Pac-Man did not have a major effect on intelligence, but today's games are highly complex. "Learning these games has also made us smarter."

East Asia has various cultural elements, including Confucianism. "Confucius also emphasized that effort matters more than innate ability in cognitive capacity. Perhaps for that reason, success in East Asia for a long time was determined by the degree of education."

Eastern parents demand relatively higher grades from their children than Western parents do. Because of this cultural difference, East Asian children spend overwhelmingly more hours studying than Western children, and this has affected their cognitive abilities.