Thanks for talking with me today, Professor Nisbett. So, you are a psychologist trained in the field of “cultural differences.” Tell me how you became interested in this topic.

My whole career has been focused on people’s reasoning. When I was starting out, I read a book entitled Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. It deals with the notion of holism, and why, traditionally, there is a lack of interest in formal logic among Eastern peoples. Well, I am an American, and we think everybody is just like us. I mean, we know that there are some differences in attitudes, preferences, and so on, but, in general, we think everyone is mostly the same.

So, what made you shift your research toward cultural comparisons?

When I started doing research with Eastern scholars, I discovered we had qualitative differences and approaches across a variety of subjects. The Asians were thinking one way, and the Westerners were thinking another way. It was striking to see how big the differences actually were. Around this time, I had some East Asian graduate students from Korea and Japan who were pursuing the same sort of research. These East Asian students were so brilliant, but in ways I was unaccustomed to. So I began to wonder more about these cultural differences in terms of our thinking styles. Because of all of this, I started to take the subject of cultural differences seriously.

You have devoted much of your research to the study of cultural differences, mainly between East Asians and Americans. What are some of the key discoveries you can share with us?

Well, we can begin by talking about two different mentalities, the Eastern and the Western. For example, East Asians pay attention to context to a much greater extent than Westerners do. Westerners tend to ignore context and focus on a certain thing. It could be a person that they want to influence or whose behavior they want to understand. It’s often said that East Asians are situation-centered. They’re obliged to be sensitive to their environment. Effective behavior in the East depends on being able to fit in with other people, to coordinate your actions with them. Americans, on the other hand, are individual-centered. They expect their environment to be sensitive to them. They expect to be able to control their environment. They can ignore social relationships safely to a much greater extent than is possible for Easterners.

Could you give some examples of the social differences between Easterners and Westerners?

If you look at a Korean company’s ads in the U.S., they may have text like “I’m unique and I’m going to do great things with △△△△.” In Korea, it’s likely to be something like “△△△△ is another family,” a message of seeking harmony and hope with fellow Koreans. That’s a very different kind of emphasis. And if I give you three things to think about―a cow, a cat, and grass―which two do you think go together? If you’re an East Asian, you’re likely to say, “Well, the cow goes with the grass because cows eat grass.” If you’re a Westerner, you’re likely to say, “Well, the cow goes with the cat because they’re both animals.” There’s also a clever experiment conducted by a social psychologist, where he asks people to draw a circle representing themselves and other circles representing their closest acquaintances. Then they’re told to draw connections between themselves and each of those people, and to draw connections between each of those people to the extent that they’re connected to each other. The picture you get from Americans is going to have their own circle in the center, usually larger than those of their acquaintances. East Asians, however, are likely to have their own circle off to the side, and it will be the same size as those of their acquaintances, or perhaps even smaller. The self is a really big deal in the West. In the East, the self is just one of many.

That’s quite interesting. There seems to be a very different conception of the self in the East in general.

That’s right. And these social differences translate into cognitive differences. Perception and reasoning in the East tend to be holistic, taking into account the entire context as well as the relationships between the context and individuals or objects. And in the West, they tend to be analytic, focusing on the most central object, which is the most important one to deal with or the most important one to control. In a study, we showed participants still photographs of a train in the countryside or an animal in a particular setting, and we watched where they were looking. The American subjects spent nearly all of their time looking at the central object, concentrating on what its attributes were. The East Asian subjects, however, looked back and forth between the context and the object. They were able to tell us much more about the context than the Americans could at the end.

So, you’ve established that differences between the Eastern and Western ways of thinking exist. Where do those differences come from?

We must look into the foundations of ancient Chinese and Greek thinking to answer that question. Twenty-five hundred years ago, it was known to Chinese thinkers that there can be action at a distance. The reason for the tides was understood by the ancient Chinese. That wasn’t understood even by Galileo, the great 17th-century scientist. In fact, in the West, it was scientific dogma that there can be action only if there’s connection, material touching material. Interestingly, it was 18th-century scientists who proved that there could be action at a distance―magnetism, acoustic phenomena, and so on. And it’s important to understand that science as we know it was shaped by the Greeks. Their impact was possible because they thought in terms of rules about categories. And, at its core, science is all about rules about categories. And now let’s think about formal logic. It’s not generally known in the West where we got formal logic from. Some people tend to think, “Well, we always had it.” No, we didn’t.

So where did formal logic come from?

The story goes that Aristotle got sick of listening to lousy arguments in the market and at political assemblies. And one of the types of logic that he spoke about is syllogism, which has premises and a conclusion. So, the premise might be all A’s are B’s. C is an A; therefore, C is a B. That is a valid argument. Formal logic has been around since the time of Aristotle. However, in ancient China, there was no concern about formal logic. From my perspective, the nature of social relations determines the way of thinking in any society. In a broader context, I believe the origin of all these differences is economic. The way you earn a living determines your social relationships, which in turn determines the way you think. There is good evidence for this. For example, China is a land of plains with rivers running through them. It’s very well equipped for mass agriculture. In Greece, that’s impossible. Greece is full of mountains descending to the sea, so occupations there were more likely to be tending small farms, trading, or keeping animals.

I imagine that’s because rice farming requires collective efforts among farmers to manage communal irrigation and coordinate the transplanting and harvesting of rice; by contrast, farming in Greece does not require as many collective, coordinated actions.

Exactly. We’ve also found that farmers and fishermen in a small area of Turkey are holistic in their thinking, as compared to animal herders, who don’t have to depend on other people as much. In the same way, in Europe, the Industrial Revolution pushed Westerners and their respective cultures into an analytical direction because it created much more freedom of independent action.

How are these differences in thinking, which have been around for 2,500 years, seen in East Asia and America in the 21st century?

Today, if an East Asian is trying to be terribly logical in their argument, it’s considered childish. At the base of Western thought is something even more rudimentary than formal logic. It’s the concept that A equals A. A thing is itself and not some other thing. And A and not A can’t both be true. An object can’t have both the property A and the property not A―that’s impossible. It couldn’t be more different in the East, where there’s always been a strong appreciation for what Western thinkers called dialecticism. The principle of dialecticism is captured by the Eastern concept of the Dao, yin and yang, different quantities, different objects, different events, and different processes that compete and can contradict one another and change into one another. This way of thinking is largely foreign to Westerners.

Are there any principles that contribute to this way of thinking?

There is the principle of change―that reality is changing all the time. What’s currently true is soon going to be false. Additionally, the principle of contradiction explains that change is constant, and contradiction is the dynamic that underlies change. Finally, we have the principle of relationships, or holism. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts are only meaningful in relation to the whole. In one of the studies that we did, we presented college students with proverbs that either contained a contradiction or did not. So, the contradiction might have been in a proverb like “a person is stronger than steel and weaker than a fly.” Or “too humble is half proud.” To the Western mind, too humble is not proud at all. These contradictions are more readily understood and appreciated by Easterners, who tend to like these contradictions in proverbs better than Westerners do.

You have praised holistic thinking as a key way to compensate for the limitations in Western analytic thinking. Would you define your views on cultural “contact” between different thinking styles as focusing more on the positive than the negative?

As a social psychologist, I cannot think of anything negative about cultural differences, because viewing problems through different approaches helps address them. For example, South Korean society is tremendously successful. It seems you have adapted the analytic Western style of thinking, which directly contrasts with your holistic Eastern style of thinking. This is amazing! Your GDP per capita right after the Korean War was the same as the African country of Kenya. Korea has progressed extremely rapidly. There is something going on, possibly a hybridization, that has proved to be highly beneficial.

Looking into the future, what would you recommend for those who want to learn about different thinking styles?

Reading essays and books as I did on these topics is a good place to start. And, of course, I would recommend reading my own book. (laughs)

I would recommend that too. Thank you for speaking with me today, Professor Nisbett. It’s been an enlightening experience.