Chinese and Americans See Things Differently

We already knew that Chinese and Americans were different, the reason behind these differences being the social and political environment, education etc. But we didn't know that the differences reside in the very way they see things.

A study conducted by the University of Michigan has found that two groups of students, a Chinese one and an American one, looked at scenes in photographs in distinct ways.

The North Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal object, whereas East Asians are generally more holistic, giving more consideration to the context. Researchers have not known, however, whether these differences originate during the encoding, retrieval, or mental comparison stages of perceptual-cognitive processing, or whether they might even be the result of reporting bias.

To try to pinpoint when these differences emerge, Richard E. Nisbett of the University of Michigan and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which Chinese and American students were shown a number of images, each depicting a single subject against a realistic and complex background. The participants, who wore an eye-movement tracker during the tests, were then shown pictures containing the same subjects on either old or new backgrounds and asked to judge whether they had seen the subjects before.

As the team predicted, the American students homed in on the focal subject sooner and longer than did the Chinese students, who paid more attention to the background imagery. This suggests that the Americans encoded more visual details for the focal objects than did the Chinese, which would explain why the Americans fared better when it came to determining whether they had seen a given subject before, even when it was presented against a new backdrop.

The findings are being published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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