quote:

Originally posted by NeoPhono I find it hard to believe that there is that large of an objective difference. I'd also add that this study was looking to see how well people understood other's perspectives. Can a non-American, one of a different culture, really be said to understand what it is like to live in an American, non-collectivist society? I think that is the question to be asked. How you would test that, and how well did the experiments test the opposite also needs to be questioned.

It doesn't mean that they can completely comprehend all the intrincacies of a different person or society. It refers to when dealing in some specific situation, where another person's viewpoint has to be taking into account on a specific subject, people in collectivistic cultures tend to take that viewpoint into account easier. I.e., if we are both doing something and I have to anticipate your reaction, a Chinese person will be able to deduce more information from circumstances about how you would react than an American. This doesn't seem like much but when compounded in millions of interactions, you get the 'ignorant' American stereotype.

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

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Originally posted by HardTranceProd holy fucking shit i'm speechless

LOL, I had the same reaction the first time I saw it.

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"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me." -Martin Niemöller

american's arent inherently ignorant, though i do like to tease them about it

its due to being a decadent country- ie so much of australian world news deals with the US because that news is arguably pretty important. if you are only inundated with your own culture/popular culture/media constantly, you're bound to become insulated from the outside world to a certain extent.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN american's arent inherently ignorant, though i do like to tease them about it its due to being a decadent country- ie so much of australian world news deals with the US because that news is arguably pretty important. if you are only inundated with your own culture/popular culture/media constantly, you're bound to become insulated from the outside world to a certain extent.

I think it's to a great extent , and due to the fact that our nation is incredibly young. It just never had the chance or time to refine it's 'culture.'

___________________
"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me." -Martin Niemöller

How the hell has this become a discussion on American ignorance? This has got nothing to do with ignorance whatsoever:

quote:

The Effect of Culture on Perspective Taking ABSTRACT—People consider the mental states of other people to understand their actions. We evaluated whether such perspective taking is culture dependent. People in collectivistic cultures (e.g., China) are said to have interdependent selves, whereas people in individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) are said to have independent selves. To evaluate the effect of culture, we asked Chinese and American pairs to play a communication game that required perspective taking. Eye-gaze measures demonstrated that the Chinese participants were more tuned into their partner's perspective than were the American participants. Moreover, Americans often completely failed to take the perspective of their partner, whereas Chinese almost never did. We conclude that cultural patterns of interdependence focus attention on the other, causing Chinese to be better perspective takers than Americans. Although members of both cultures are able to distinguish between their perspective and another person's perspective, cultural patterns afford Chinese the effective use of this ability to interpret other people's actions.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/do...80.2007.01946.x

Unfortunately, I couldn't read the original article due to subscription problems, but it seems HTP has missed the point completely...

The problem here seems to be not perception or cognition (i.e. someone's intelligence) but communication strategies. First of all, I'd like to know what sentence was used in Chinese, and how Chinese people use body language in order to convey meaning.

I find it very strange that the psychologists came to that conclusion using different completely unrelated languages — but then again, I can't read their argumentation, and Keysar himself said it was an oversimplification.

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Originally posted by tathi first time i´ve read portugese, fuck its practically the same as spanish

Portuguese == Compressed Spanish

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Originally posted by Lira Portuguese == Old Spanish

Fixed!

I'm gonna look for the article, I can access it through my university database. I'll get back to you when I have it. I don't think the findings are going to be able to be ruled out due to semantics though. This differences are reasonable conclusions of the prevailing theories about social interactions in collectivistic/individualistic cultures. They've just never done head to head comparisons in such a specific way.

Edit: No go on the paper, apparently its too recent, I thought it might be a bit older. The guys does appear to have A LOT of work on communication style and perspective taking so I would think that the construction of the experiment should be decent.

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

Last edited by venomX on Jul-19-2007 at 04:03

Here's the full article. I haven't read it yet.

(Please be nice to my server.)

LINK

quote:

Originally posted by venomX I'm gonna look for the article, I can access it through my university database. I'll get back to you when I have it. I don't think the findings are going to be able to be ruled out due to semantics though. This differences are reasonable conclusions of the prevailing theories about social interactions in collectivistic/individualistic cultures. They've just never done head to head comparisons in such a specific way.

If you find it, could you please send it to me?

I wasn't talking about semantics, exclusively, but supra-linguistic forms of communication. For example: let's suppose Americans give orders looking at the person and the Chinese give orders looking at the object. Americans, then, have much more difficulty finding out what the object of the action will be, but they know when they're supposed to be the agent - the Chinese, on the other hand, would know what they were supposed to do, but it would be quite difficult to find out who was supposed to do that.

Besides, I'm quite sceptical about most kind of "inter-cultural comparisons", because they're often too influenced by pre-existing stereotypes. Nihonjinron is a nice example of how that can happen.

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Originally posted by Lira If you find it, could you please send it to me?

I just posted it, right above your last post.

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Originally posted by NeoPhono I just posted it, right above your last post.

I had just noticed that

Thanks a lot, NeoPhono, I'm going to read it now

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Ah, much more interesting...

There is no reason to suspect that Chinese and Americans have a different understanding of the role of mental states in people’s actions. In fact, the appreciation of the mind of the other, or theory of mind, has an identical developmental trajectory for Chinese and Americans. By 5 years of age, both can begin to use another person’s knowledge, distinguishing it from their own knowledge and showing appreciation for the role of another person’s knowledge in predicting what he or she will do (Sabbagh et al., 2006). On the surface, then, our results are strange because they might suggest that our American subjects had lost this ability by the time they reached adulthood. This is not what we mean to imply, however.

There's always a however

We make a distinction between having perspective-taking ability and using this ability (Keysar et al., 2003). Both Chinese and American children show clear ability to reflect upon the mental states of other people. But using this ability to spontaneously and unreflectively interpret the actions of another person is a different matter. It seems that culture has its effect here at the level of use, not ability. It takes prolonged exposure to cultural patterns that reinforce attention to the other to induce a mode of interpretation that is not egocentric.
Apparently, the interdependence that pervades Chinese culture has its effect on members of the culture over time, taking advantage of the human ability to distinguish between the mind of the self and that of the other, and developing this ability to allow Chinese to unreflectively interpret the actions of another person from his or her
perspective.
Americans do not lose the ability to reflect on and reason about another person’s mental state. They can accurately judge that another person cannot see occluded objects. But years of exposure to a culture that values independence and does not promote other-orientation does not provide the tools to unreflectively interpret actions from the perspective of the other.

It's the difference between research data and what is essentially journalistic sensationalism.
Americans aren't martians
Chinese aren't drones
All's still well in the world in that regard

This caused our American subjects either to show disregard for the director’s perspective (‘‘which block?’’) or to take more time and effort overcoming their own perspective in order to understand what the director actually meant (see also Epley, Morewedge,
& Keysar, 2004).

As Mead (1934) suggested, perspective taking is indeed crucial for any social interaction. People’s behavior is ambiguous because it can be motivated by a variety of underlying intentions.

Therefore, the interpretation of another person’s actions depends on the ability to consider that person’s mental states. We have shown that unreflective perspective taking is very much a function of cultural patterns. Unreflective perspective taking is more natural for members of a culture that emphasizes interdependence than for members of a culture that emphasizes independence.

Which is what it really comes down too in anyone's case regardless of your cultural background.

Last edited by Lilith on Jul-19-2007 at 05:17