1: Would you prefer a job where individual initiative is encouraged or one where no individual is singled out for honor, but everybody works together as a team? That was the question asked of 15,000 people worldwide, David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
“More than 90 percent of American, British, Dutch, and Swedish respondents chose the individual initiative job,” he writes.
“But fewer that 50 percent of Japanese and Singaporean respondents did.”
Another classic study conducted in 1972 presented students from India, Taiwan, and the United States with groups of three things and asked which two go together.
“When shown pictures of a man, woman, and child, the American kids tended to put the man and woman together, because they are both adults,” David explains.
“The Taiwanese kids tended to put the woman and child together because the mother takes care of the baby.”
Then, the students were shown pictures of a chicken, a cow, and grass. “The American kids put the chicken and cow together because they are both animals,” he notes. “The Taiwanese kids put the cow and the grass together because a cow eats grass.”
The takeaway? “In these and many other cases,” he writes, “the Americans tended to sort by categories and the Taiwanese tended to sort by relationships.”
2: Culture shapes us. David defines culture as: “A shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality. People who grow up in different cultures see the world differently—sometimes on the most elemental level.”
Richard Nisbett is a prominent American psychologist who has spent decades exploring the cultural differences between the East and the West.
“He traces these differences in part to the values that were emphasized by early Eastern and Western thinkers and philosophers,” David explains.
“The classical Greeks, at the source of Western culture, emphasized individual agency and competition,” he notes. “Westerners thus tend to explain a person’s behavior by what’s going on inside their individual mind—the person’s traits, emotions, and intentions.”
The emphasis of early Confucianism was on social harmony. Writing in his book The Geography of Thought, Richard quotes Henry Rosemont, an authority on Chinese philosophy, who said, “For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation. . . I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others.”
3: That said, we are wise to be careful about these types of generalizations.
“It’s not as if we can dump all people from the West in a box called ‘individualism’ and all people from the East in a box called ‘collectivism,'” David writes.
Yes, behaviors in each culture are different. And, we have to “look for the generalization but then see through the generalization,” he observes. . . Today, in our identity politics world, we are constantly reducing people to their categories: Black/white, gay/straight, Republican/Democrat. It’s a first-class way to dehumanize others and not see individuals.”
Instead, David suggests, we can be curious: “How do I see a person as part of their group? And how, at the same time, do I see them as a never-to-be-repeated unique individual, bringing their own unique mind and viewpoint?”
We have an opportunity to adopt a type of “double vision” where we hold two perspectives together at the same time.
“It means stepping back to appreciate the power of group culture and how it is formed over generations and then poured into a person,” he notes.
“But it also means stepping close and perceiving each individual person in the midst of their lifelong project of crafting their own life and their own point of view, often in defiance of their group’s consciousness.”
There are two fallacies: First, that culture is everything. And second, that culture is nothing.
We can say: “I am the receiver of gifts,” David writes. “I am part of a long procession of humanity and I have received much from those who came before.”
And, we are not “passive vessels,” he notes. We all create our own identity, “embracing some bits of our culture, rejecting others—taking the stories of the past and transforming them with our own lives.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Is culture everything? Or nothing?
Action: Journal about my thoughts on the questions above. Is there a third option?
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