Until recent years, scientists had largely ignored the global diversity of thinking. In 2010, an influential article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences reported that the vast majority of psychological subjects had been "western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic", or 'Weird' for short. Nearly 70 percent were American, and most were undergraduate students hoping to gain pocket money or course credits by giving up their time to take part in these experiments.
The tacit assumption had been that this select group of people could represent universal truths about human nature – that all people are basically the same. If that were true, the Western bias would have been unimportant. Yet the small number of available studies which had examined people from other cultures would suggest that this is far from the case. "Westerners – and specifically Americans – were coming out at the far end of the distributions," says Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia, who was one of the study's authors.
Some of the most notable differences revolved around the concepts of "individualism" and "collectivism"; whether you consider yourself to be independent and self-contained, or entwined and interconnected with the other people around you, valuing the group over the individual. Generally speaking - there are many exceptions - people in the West tend to be more individualist, and people from Asian countries like India, Japan or China tend to be more collectivist.
In many cases, the consequences are broadly as you would expect. When questioned about their attitudes and behaviours, people in more individualistic, Western societies tend to value personal success over group achievement, which in turn is also associated with the need for greater self-esteem and the pursuit of personal happiness. But this thirst for self-validation also manifests in overconfidence, with many experiments showing that Weird participants are likely to overestimate their abilities. When asked about their competence, for instance, 94 percent of American professors claimed they were "better than average".
People in more collectivist societies tend to be more 'holistic' in the way they think about problems, focusing more on the relationships and the context of the situation at hand, while people in individualistic societies tend to focus on separate elements, and to consider situations as fixed and unchanging.
But why did the different thinking styles emerge in the first place? The obvious explanation would be that they simply reflect the prevailing philosophies that have come to prominence in each region over time. Nisbett points out that Western philosophers emphasised freedom and independence, whereas Eastern traditions like Taoism tended to focus on concepts of unity. Confucius, for instance, emphasised the "obligations that obtained between emperor and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother, and between friend and friend". These diverse ways of viewing the world are embedded in the culture's literature, education, and political institutions, so it is perhaps of little surprise that those ideas have been internalised, influencing some very basic psychological processes.
There's a joke in Ronny Chieng's Netflix special about trains that sums this all up really well. You should watch his set.Working with scientists in China, Talhelm tested more than 1,000 students in various rice- and wheat-growing regions, using measures such as the triad test of holistic thinking. They also asked people to draw a diagram demonstrating their relationships to their friends and associates: people in individualistic societies tend to draw themselves as bigger than their friends, whereas collectivists tend to make everyone the same size. "Americans tend to draw themselves very large," Talhelm says.
As a second generation Asian American myself, I definitely do see the dissonance with how my peers and my parents' generation see things.
