Culture, control, and perception of relationships in the environment.

Abstract

East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively "holistic", that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole. Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object-focused and control-oriented. We compared East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans on detection of covariation and field dependence. The results showed that (1) Chinese participants reported stronger association between events, were more responsive to differences in covariation, and were more confident about their covariation judgments; (2) These cultural differences disappeared when participants believed they had some control over the covariation judgment task; (3) American participants made fewer mistakes on the Rod-and-Frame test, indicating that they were less field dependent; (4) American performance and confidence, but not that of Asians, increased when participants were given manual control of the test. Possible origins of the perceptual differences are discussed. Characters (with spaces): 958 Culture, Control and Perception 3 Scholars in many disciplines have maintained that people in Asian cultures, especially the East Asian cultures of China, Korea and Japan, have a relatively holistic cognitive orientation, emphasizing relationships and connectedness. The traditional Chinese view, from ancient times forward, is that "the world is a collection of overlapping and interpenetrating stuffs or substances…" (Hansen, 1983, p. 30). Since the Chinese saw the world as interpenetrating and continuous, their attempts to understand it caused them to be oriented toward the complexities of the perceptual or conceptual field taken as a whole (Moore, 1968, p. 3). For the Chinese, the individual object was "not a primary conceptual starting point" (Moser, 1996, p. 169) "[T]he background scheme [of Chinese thought was] that of mass substances rather than that of objects and properties" (Hansen, 1983, p. 31).

Proactive and politically skilled professionals: What is the relationship with affective occupational commitment?

“…It would also be interesting to replicate this study in China. China is well known for its holistic culture (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; see also Law, Wang, & Hui, 2010). Given this holistic culture, it can be that employees differentiate less between occupational and organizational commitment, as they are both work related, than in less holistic cultures.…”

Where is the love? The social aspects of mimicry

“…Social processes can extend to a basic perceptual and cognitive level, and research from cultural and social psychology indicated that the mimicker characteristics, such as self-construal, are correlated with the perceptual and cognitive mimicker characteristics (Witkin et al 1979;Witkin & Goodenough 1981;Ji et al 2000). Field dependence, for example, which refers to the phenomenon of perceptually integrating objects in their context, goes together with socially being more attuned to others.…”

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception

“…For example, Westerners tend to explain events in terms that refer primarily or entirely to salient objects (including people), whereas East Asians are more inclined to explain events in terms of contextual factors (3)(4)(5). There also are differences in performance on perceptual judgment and memory tasks (6)(7)(8). For example, Masuda and Nisbett (6) asked participants to report what they saw in underwater scenes.…”

“…The difference in attending to objects vs. context also was shown in a perceptual judgment task, the Rod and Frame test (7). American and Chinese participants looked down a long box.…”