Cultural stereotypes are enduring lenses through which many of us understand others. Increased immigration and international travel as well as education in media literacy and critical thinking can help to erode such stereotypes. At the same time, the post-9/11 encouragement of “us versus them” attitudes reinforces stereotypes, especially the most negative ones. Given the tragic history of exoticizing others, one would anticipate that social scientists would be particularly careful to avoid doing it in their work. Instead, sweeping generalizations backed up by questionable methodology and tendentious argument appear to be on the rise. At the very least, they are not getting the scrutiny they deserve. This review examines some contemporary stereotypes in recent culturalist work on East Asia by North American researchers.
Part of the flood of culturalist argument coming out of North America includes the book The Geography of Thought: How Culture Colors the Way the Mind Works. The author is Richard Nisbett, head of the University of Michigan’s Culture and Cognition Program and a very widely cited and highly regarded academic.[1] In his acknowledgements, Nisbett notes that many of the ideas in his book “have been shaped by discussions with colleagues in fields ranging from philosophy to physics.” He then cites a list of equally well-regarded colleagues at such ranking institutions as the University of California at Los Angeles, New York University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kyoto University, Rutgers University, and so on. I list these elite affiliations to show that the reader can rightfully expect that the book, even though targeted at a broad market, was ostensibly the product of a careful process of fact-checking, consideration of alternative hypotheses, and other standard tools of good academic research.
Many people have been convinced by this work.[2] Indeed, Nisbett’s book has been translated in Japanese as Ki o Miru Seiyoujin, Mori o Miru Touyoujin (“Westerners See Trees, Easterners the Forest”) and appears to have attracted even more favourable attention than the English-language original.[3] The tone of the reviews and comments suggest that many find the book persuasive not only because it appears to be a scientific study but importantly because readers accepts the ideas it seeks to prove.
The book itself argues that westerners and Asians (especially east Asians) have different ways of thinking — hence the title’s reference to the “geography of thought.” We are all familiar with the stereotypes: westerners are detail-oriented whereas Asians are concerned with the context of things.[4] These stereotypes are so hoary in fact that Nisbett periodically assures the reader that the generalizations do not hold for all individuals in the West and Asia, while just as quickly asserting “the fact that there are very real differences, substantial on the average, between East Asians and people of European culture” (p. 77). Moreover, Nisbett backs up his thesis by citing an extensive list of sources that have made this claim, while ignoring the numerous criticisms of such culturalist reasoning. For example, though Hasegawa Yokyo,[5] Sugimoto Yoshio and Ross Mouer,[6] John Lie,[7] Harumi Befu,[8] and plenty of others have written extensively and devastatingly on such culturalist interpretations of Japan, none of this work is cited in Nisbett’s book.
In addition to his very partial review of the literature, Nisbett draws on empirical support from studies of what he depicts as “Asian” and “Western” subjects in experimental situations. These studies were carried out with help from colleagues in Nisbett’s own institution — the University of Michigan — as well as Kyoto University, Seoul National University, and China’s Beijing University and the Chinese Institute of Psychology. Nisbett also makes frequent reference to other studies that appear primarily to have been conducted with graduate students in the US, Japan, China and elsewhere.
Yet one of the very basic problems with the work, from the perspective of statistical literacy and related approaches,[9] is that Nisbett’s “westerners” are all American graduate students (excluding any of Asian descent). There appear to be no Europeans used in the studies, in spite of the fact that there is so much variation in perceptions and ideas distinguishing Americans from Europeans (not to mention within those regions as well). Moreover, most of the study results appear (Nisbett rarely divulges the numbers) to show only marginal differences between the American and Asian graduate students’ responses to various laboratory experiments to test their perceptual and other tendencies. Yet these tendencies are discussed through the bulk of the book as though they were vast, dichotomized differences in seeing the world that have persisted over millennia.
Is this Science?
So all the book’s generalizations rest largely on data from several ostensibly scientific studies using graduate students. Is there anyone out there who thinks graduate students are a representative sample of any population except perhaps fellow graduate students? I mean this as no insult to graduate students, of course, having been one myself not so many years ago. Even in America, where there is a rather high rate of students proceeding to graduate school,[10] no one would think of them as a representative sample of Americans, let alone the so-called west. But in addition, the study participants were graduate students in a few big cities and elite universities in geographically limited areas. On top of that, they were graduate students who were willing to participate in studies, meaning they were either hard up for money and/or interested in the research. In other words, the sample was emphatically not representative of the larger populations of Europe, East Asia, and America: by income, social class, ethnicity, educational level, to mention a few critical variables. And the sample appears to have been self-selected, rather than randomly chosen, which biases the results even more.
Hence, whether the study demonstrated anything has to be approached with a skeptical eye, employing the basic lessons of statistical literacy, as this is how science works. It is of course possible that the reputed differences between Asian and western ways of thinking actually exist, just as any hypothesis is possible. But in order to make a convincing demonstration that the hypothesized phenomenon exists, one needs not only unimpeachable data. One also has to employ the standard scientific methods that are used to reduce potential interference from the confirmation bias and other logical fallacies.[11] Nisbett and his colleagues appear to have made no effort to disconfirm their study. Surely, had he done so, he would have put that in the book to strengthen the argument. Without a gauntlet of skepticism and criticism guiding the design of the experiments, the selection of subjects, the interpretation of the apparently weak results, and so on, the conclusions have little credibility.
Judging from the reviews mentioned earlier, many of Nisbett’s readers might regard this as too stern an approach concerning an issue on which lots of people agree. However, it is precisely common sense (as Einstein argued, “the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”) that is the problem. Common sense is what one agrees with, and because one agrees one is inclined to favour impressions and arguments that appear to confirm it. Rigorous scientific study only takes place when one is willing to challenge all hypotheses, and thus ready to forfeit or at least qualify one’s own pet theories.
The Writing on the Wall
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