Differences in thinking between the East and the West

Differences in thinking between East and West

In a nutshell, the differences in thinking between East and West are reflected in the following eight points:

1. Patterns of attention and perception: Orientals pay attention to the environment whereas Occidentals pay attention to the objects, and Orientals are more interested in studying the relationship between events than Occidentals.

There is a typical psychological experiment: psychologists let students at Kyoto University and the University of Michigan respectively watch eight colorful underwater virtual light photos, which all have one or more fish in the "focal point" position, which is larger, more vividly colored, and moves faster than the other things on the screen. The fish are larger, more colorful, and move faster than anything else in the frame. There are also slower moving animals in each frame, plants, rocks, blisters, etc. This image lasts about 20 seconds. This image lasted about 20 seconds. Then it was shown again. After the second screening, participants were asked to answer questions about what they saw.

A similar number of Americans and Japanese mentioned the fish in the center of attention. But more than 60 percent of the Japanese mentioned background components, including water, rocks, blisters, and inanimate plants and animals. In addition, Japanese participants' first sentences tended to refer to the environment ("This looks like a pond"). In contrast, American participants were three times more likely to refer to the fish in the focal position in their first sentence ("There's a big fish there, probably a salmon, swimming off to the left.")

The conclusion therefore is that Easterners are relatively more concerned with context than Westerners. That is to say, Westerners are relatively invisible to changes in objects in a certain background, and to changes in the relationships between objects, and accordingly we can say that Westerners are able to capture transformations in objects in the foreground more quickly than Easterners.

On the other hand, the reluctance of the Chinese to undergo surgery is due to the Chinese view of harmony and relationships, which is perfectly understandable, as health depends on the balance of the various forces in the body and the relationships between the various parts of the body.

And the Chinese tendency to study the intricacies of relationships can also be seen in such habits as inviting Feng Shui readers in the past.

2. Basic assumptions about the composition of the world: Easterners see matter, while Westerners see objects.

Looking at a piece of wood, the Chinese philosophers saw that the whole is composed of a single substance without gaps or several substances blended with water and milk and composed of the whole, the Greek philosophers saw that the object is composed of particles. That is to say, for the Chinese, the background schema of the nature of the world is the whole of matter, not a collection of unrelated objects; whereas in the background schema of Greek philosophy objects are isolated.

The different understandings of the constitution of the world inform many of the manifestations described below.

3. Perceived control over the environment: Westerners believe in control over the environment more than Easterners.

Twentieth-century psychologists presented evidence that economic and social factors influence perceptual habits. Hermann Witkin proposed 'field dependence', which refers to the extent to which the perception of an object is influenced by the context or environment in which it appears. For example, the longer it takes people to spot a given simple figure from a complex background, the deeper the field dependence.

There are people who work in jobs where they rarely work closely with each other, such as hunting and gathering, and compared to these people, those who work in agriculture have a stronger field dependence. Traditional farmers have a stronger field dependence than people living in industrial societies.

China, as the mother culture of Southeast Asian culture and one of the two oldest agricultural centers in the world, has been more y influenced by agriculture than the West, and in the next section I will explain in detail how agriculture has shaped the course of nations.

The perception of control over the environment is also reflected in a sense of "control over life". Social psychologist Alan Lange defines the "illusion of control" as an expectation of personal success that exceeds the guarantees offered by objective possibilities.

If life is simple, and you will succeed if you are smart and careful, then life is controllable. If life is complex, and you have to accept the referee of the vagaries of fate, then life is less manageable. Research has shown that Asians do not have the confidence to control themselves as much as Westerners do, and that Asians try to adapt to situations rather than trying to control them.

For Asians, the world is a complex place made up of a continuum of matter, and it is better to understand the world as a whole than to look at it one-sidedly, and Asians prefer collective control to individual control.

For Westerners, the world is a relatively simple place, made up of isolated objects that are understood without regard to their context, and Westerners highly favor individual control.

4. Perceptions of stasis and change: Westerners see stasis while Easterners see change.

While Heraclitus in the 6th century BC suggested that "a man can never step into the same river twice." This showed that the world was changing, but in the 5th century B.C. Barmenides "proved" in a few simple steps that change was impossible, and the idea that the world was static made its grand entrance into the mainstream of the West.

The Chinese view of life, on the other hand, has been shaped by a fusion of three philosophies: Taoism, Confucianism and, later, Buddhism. Each of these philosophies emphasizes harmony and most of them are opposed to abstract discourse, such as the Taoist yin and yang, the Tao Te Ching's fortune and misfortune, or the famous tale of the lost horse, which expresses the Oriental attitude to life, in which the world is ever-changing and full of contradictions. To understand a state of events should be grasped from the opposites of the existence of the event, now real may be transformed to its opposites.