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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: East Versus West East Versus West Richard Nisbett used to be a universalist. Like many cognitive scientists, the University of Michigan professor held that all people—from the Kung tribe that forages in southern Africa to programmers in Silicon Valley—process sensory information the same way. But after visiting Peking University in 1982 and partnering with an Asian researcher, Nisbett found his beliefs challenged. He embarked on a project to probe the thought processes of East Asians and European Americans. His experiment presented subjects with a virtual aquarium on a computer screen. “The Americans would say, ‘I saw three big fish swimming off to the left. They had pink fins.’ They went for the biggest, brightest moving object and focused on that and on its attributes,” Nisbett explains. “The Japanese in that study would start by saying, ‘Well, I saw what looked like a stream. The water was green. There were rocks and shells on the bottom. There were three big fish swimming off to the left.’” In other studies Nisbett discovered that East Asians have an easier time remembering objects when they are presented with the same background against which they were first seen. By contrast, context doesn’t seem to affect Western recognition of an object. “I thought there wasn’t going to be any difference, and then we kept coming up with these very large differences,” says Nisbett, a stately, white-haired man of 67, as we sit in the Upper East Side headquarters of the Russell Sage Foundation. In lieu of his regular salary, he has a grant from Sage to research the nature of intelligence while on sabbatical from Michigan’s psychology department, where he has taught since 1971. Scientists now attach gizmos to people’s heads that track eyeball movement; these experiments have confirmed Nisbett’s findings, recording that Americans spend more time looking at the featured object in an array while Asians take in the entire scene, darting between background and foreground. East Asians see things in context, while Westerners focus on the point at hand; the former are dependent, the latter independent; the former are holistic, the latter analytic. There’s a social aspect to these differences: Asians are collectivistic, Westerners individualistic. Even if cognition does differ across cultures, why should we care? For one thing, it might help explain why we’re prone to bubbles. In Nisbett’s 2003 book The Geography of Thought he describes a study in which students were shown a graph with a line snaking upward across it, representing a trend like world deaths from tuberculosis or the gdp of Brazil. Investigators asked subjects to indicate how they thought the trend would continue. Many Americans sketched a line that continued skyward, while most Chinese forecast a peak and then a decline. A colleague of Nisbett’s also showed that while Canadians predict a stock whose value is rising will continue to rise, Chinese think what goes up will come down. An intriguing difference, although one wonders if 1998’s pancontinental financial crisis in Asia or the real estate and stock market crash in Tokyo affected students; in the U.S. the Nasdaq crash of 2000-02 was not as memorable. Nisbett doubts the theory but admits “the Confucian idea that the future will resemble the past is deeply ingrained in the Asian mind.” He reasons that cross-cultural differences can also explain societal phenomena. Nisbett defines a nation’s preference for lawyers over engineers as a ratio: the number of the former divided by the number of the latter. When he compared America’s ratio to Japan’s, he found that the U.S. preferred lawyers over engineers 41-to-1. The American system, he says, prizes win-or-lose judgments, while Japan’s preference is for middlemen who draft compromises. In his most recent book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Nisbett asks why Asian-Americans score higher on the sat than other Americans and why students in Asian nations do so much better on international math and science exams than their U.S. counterparts. The answer is not, Nisbett says, that Asians are smarter. Rather, he writes, “Asian intellectual accomplishment is due more to sweat than to exceptional gray matter.” The tests measure proficiency as much as innate skill, and the proficiency comes from cultural forces, such as the Asian sense of obligation to the family. Another factor is that math lessons in Asian schools have a student working out a problem on the board as classmates chime in. That kind of collectivism confirms the commonly held belief that learning by organic induction is more effective than rote memorization. Why do you find, in a music conservatory, a lot of Asian would-be concert pianists but comparatively few Asian opera-singers-in-training? There’s a physical limit to how many hours a day a person can sing, Nisbett says, but not to how many hours one can practice sonatas. He attributes these differences to history. East Asian agriculture was a communal venture in which tasks like irrigation and crop rotation had citizens acting in concert. In contrast, Western food production led to more lone-operator farmers and herdsmen. Greek democratic philosophy emphasized the individual; the Reformation stressed a personal connection to God; the Industrial Revolution made heroes of entrepreneurs. But in Asia, Confucius said virtue hinged upon appropriate behavior for specific relationships, say, among siblings, neighbors or colleagues. These tidy generalizations are not without critics. A San Francisco State University professor who edits the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, David Matsumoto, holds that while Nisbett attaches his observations to fascinating raw data, he takes some conclusions too far. “In cross-cultural work researchers are too quick to come up with some deep, dark, mysterious interpretation of a difference with no data to support it,” Matsumoto says. “It’s difficult to draw one conclusion [from] a snippet of behavior, and that’s what this work tends to do.” Though Nisbett believes our behaviors are shaped by 2,500 years of history, he also thinks they are malleable. “I got interested in whether you could make people better at reasoning and problem-solving by certain kinds of education, and it turns out you can,” he says. If Americans are asked to think about how they are similar to other people they know, they view the aquarium scene more like Asians—and vice versa. “So these things aren’t necessarily locked in.” When it comes to cross-cultural business, Nisbett observes, East Asians want to establish relationships, while Westerners tend to keep their business connections at arm’s length. Westerners operate by the exact wording of a contract, while East Asians hold that if circumstances change, so should the agreement. Marketers, of course, are aware of cultural differences. For the same phone, Samsung emphasized contrasting messages: In the U.S. the message was “I march to the beat of my own drum,” whereas in Korea the ad campaign focused on families staying connected. But Nisbett noticed shifts within the Asian cohort last year, after he observed a group of Chinese students at a Procter & Gamble focus group. “My goodness, they were as lively as any group of American graduate students I’ve ever had. If I said something they didn’t agree with, they let me know. . . . I would never, ever feel that way with Japanese or Koreans, who are more concerned with harmony,” he says. “I think the Chinese will be more successful than the Japanese have been because they have that sense of obligation to family, but they’re also going to get this more Western attitude of wanting to succeed as individuals.” Perhaps, Nisbett speculates, the personal drive one sees in Chinese entrepreneurs is a consequence of China’s one-child policy. Because two parents and four grandparents dote on an only child, individualism is emphasized more than it used to be. As a result, Chinese youth are moving in a Western direction. In the last half-century Japan has undergone a huge shift toward democracy, but this hasn’t been accompanied by an increase in individualism, Nisbett says: “Japan is evidence that nothing changes. China is evidence that things can change like mad.” Why is Nisbett something of a lone wolf in studying the role of geography in cognition? His answer: “A lot of politically correct academics can’t stand to hear about differences. They automatically assume that if you’re pointing to difference, you’re assuming superiority of your own culture. Well, that’s just nonsense.” The upshot of Nisbett’s research is that differences are real. They might not always be for the better, but they matter. Perhaps Americans should temper their optimism, Asians their reluctance to take center stage. For it seems to Nisbett that those who will be most successful in the 21st century are the ones who grasp what’s best about both worldviews. Why Was There No Chinese Newton? By Fjordman To my essay Western Civilization and Socratic Dialogue, Dymphna of the Gates of Vienna blog wrote a comment about Greek vs. Chinese ways of thinking. This is an interesting subject which I will explore further here, with an emphasis on mathematical astronomy. The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), born in Scania or Skåne in southern Sweden, then a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, from 1600 until his death in 1601 was assisted by theGerman mathematical astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who published his Astronomia nova in 1609 with calculations of the elliptical orbit of Mars based on Brahe's careful observations. The English scholar Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) has no equal in the history of science, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein. Yet even he did not work in isolation. Here is The Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy, page 227: Kepler's laws, which helped pave the way for Newton's Principia, were developed in the early 1600s based on Brahe's naked-eye observations. Just a few decades earlier, Copernicus had placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System instead of the Earth. Ptolemaic astronomy had thus been superseded in Europe even before the introduction of the telescope. It is interesting to contrast this with Muslims, who had the same Ptolemaic and Greek starting point during the Middle Ages, yet nevertheless did not produce a similar breakthrough. Could something like the Principia have been produced in China? Here is Science and Technology in World History by James E. McClellan and Harold Dorn, page 132-133: The comet we know as Halley's Comet had been spotted many times before the great English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742), but it was not recognized as a periodic comet until eighteenth century Europe, which is significant. The Chinese had apparently never calculated the orbits of either Halley's Comet or other comets which they had observed. They had a large mass of observational data, yet never used it to deduct mathematical theories about the movement of planets and comets similar to what Kepler, Newton and others did in Europe. Newton's Principia was written a few generations after the introduction of the telescope, which makes it seductively simple to believe that the theory of universal gravity was somehow the logical conclusion of telescopic astronomy. Yet this is not at all the case. What would have happened if the telescope had been invented in China? Would we then have had a Chinese Newton? This is impossible to say for certain, of course, but I doubt it. Chinese culture never placed much emphasis on law, either in human form, as in secular Roman law, natural law or divine law. If the Chinese had invented the telescope, I suspect they would have used it to study comets, craters on the Moon etc., which would clearly have been valuable, no doubt. Any culture that used telescopes would have generated new knowledge with the device, but not necessarily a law of universal gravity. McClellan and Dorn, page 259: In his excellent book Cosmos, John North points out that in China, where astronomy was intimately connected with government and civil administration, interest in cosmological matters was not markedly scientific in the Western sense of the word and did not develop any great deductive system of a character such as we meet in Aristotle or Ptolemy. Page 136: He adds on page 139 that "Unlike Platonic and Aristotelian thought, Chinese thought was not overtly philosophical, but rather, it was historical. Joseph Needham, a well-known authority on the history of science in China, has suggested that the reason for this is that Chinese religion had no lawgiver in human guise, so that the Chinese did not naturally think in terms of laws of nature." Naturally occurring regularities and phenomena could be observed, of course, but the Chinese did not generally deduct universal natural laws from them, possibly because their view of nature was that reality is too subtle to be encoded in general, mathematical principles. In European astronomy phenomena such as comets, novae and sunspots that did not readily lend themselves to treatment in terms of laws were taken far less seriously than those that were. The history-conscious Chinese, on the other hand, kept detailed and plentiful records of all such phenomena, records which still remain a valuable source of astronomical information. Su Sung's (1020-1101 AD) astronomical water clock was an impressive mechanical device by eleventh century standards, and his work included a star map based on a new survey of the heavens, the oldest printed star map ever recorded. The Chinese could clearly produce talented individuals, but their work was often not followed up. The Imperial bureaucracy was hampered by many obstacles to the free and unfettered pursuit of scientific knowledge, especially due to excessive secrecy and regulation in the study of mathematics and astronomy. By making this study a state secret, Chinese authorities drastically reduced the number of scholars who could, legitimately or otherwise, study astronomy. This restriction greatly reduced the availability of the best and latest astronomical instruments and observational data. The Rise of Early Modern Science, second edition, by Toby E. Huff, page 313: Astronomy in the Islamic world stagnated and never fully managed to leave behind its Ptolemaic structure, as Europeans eventually did, but Muslims were familiar with Greek knowledge and geometry which the Chinese apparently failed to adopt during the Mongol period. The sphericity of the Earth had been known to the ancient Greeks since at least the time of Aristotle in the fourth century BC and was never seriously questioned among those who were influenced by Greek knowledge in the Middle East, in Europe and to some extent in India. The myth that medieval European scholars believed in a flat Earth is of modern origin. Mesopotamian mathematical astronomy reached India during the Persian conquests of northwest India by the fifth century BC, along with alphabetic writing systems. Contact with Greek astronomy came after Alexander the Great's conquests of the same region and through trade contact between Romans and western India during the first and second centuries AD. This was the period after Hipparchus but before Ptolemy, so the Greek astronomy used in India was not that of Ptolemy. Indians were clearly influenced by spherical trigonometry in the Greek fashion as well as by Babylonian material, but the Indian tradition was far from a passive science. Here is Victor J. Katz in A History of Mathematics, second edition, page 196: I have consulted a number of balanced, scholarly works, and even a rather pro-Chinese book such as A Cultural History of Modern Science in China by Benjamin A. Elman admits that Chinese scholars still believed in a flat Earth in the seventeenth century AD, when European Jesuits missionaries introduced new mathematical and geographical knowledge to China: Japan received much scientific and technological information from China and with Korean immigrants during the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries AD. Until contact with Europeans, Japanese astronomy was based almost entirely on that of the Koreans and the Chinese. They borrowed institutional patterns from China, but these did not fit Japan equally well and the knowledge of astronomy and calendar-making became increasingly hereditary, which depressed scientific standards. They also took over some of China's flaws, for instance with ranking astrology and divination higher in the scale of human wisdom than calendar-making and what we would consider serious mathematical astronomy. The Chinese mathematical tradition was significant (certainly better than the non-existent Roman one), but less influential than the Indian one. I would be tempted to say that China was a hardware civilization whereas India was a software civilization. The truth is that given the size of their economy and population, the Chinese were weaker in mathematics than might have been expected if you believe in an economic explanation for scientific advances. The Japanese and Korean mathematical traditions were again largely dependent upon the Chinese one. Given the level of technological sophistication these nations have shown and the talent they have demonstrated in using mathematics, they have contributed surprisingly little to developing mathematics, whereas the European contribution to global mathematics is greatly disproportionate. This proves that although some minimum level of wealth is a necessary cause for the growth of science (extremely poor people concentrate on surviving, not on inventing calculus or comparative linguistics), it is by no means a sufficient one. From the fourteenth until the twentieth century, almost all important global advances in mathematics were European. I would be tempted to say that European leadership was stronger in mathematics than in almost any other scholarly discipline. Perhaps the simplest explanation for why the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe is because the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once famously stated, and Europeans did more than any other civilization to develop or discover the vocabulary of this language. The introduction of the telescope was a major watershed in the history of astronomy, but we should remember that it alone did not create modern astronomy. The birth of astrophysics in the late nineteenth century came through the combination of the telescope with photography and spectroscopy, all inventions that were exclusively made in Europe. Spectroscopy could not be developed until chemistry as a scientific discipline had been formed, which only happened in Europe. New fuels, engines and materials later made space travel possible. Asian rockets were powered by gunpowder and weighed a couple of kilograms at most. They could not have challenged the Earth's gravity and explored the Solar System. The Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 on its journey to the Moon in 1969 used liquid hydrogen and oxygen, elements which had been discovered in Europe. The very concept of gravity, too, was developed only in Europe. The exploration of the Solar System and the universe at large was to an overwhelming degree made possible by a single civilization alone, the Western one.
Poster Comment: Bottom line: more busing.
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