Transcript

Here is a quick question, what do you think of when I say the word culture? You may think about people in different parts of the world, eat different kind of foods, dress in different style of clothes, and speak different languages. And if you think a little more beyond the superficial, you may also consider how they can have drastically different beliefs or wills and may say the same thing differently. In fact, cross cultural psychology studies have revealed that when think about something, people who live in Western cultures, such as North Americans and Europeans utilize an analytical style of thinking which focus on individual objects and separating parts from the whole, whereas people in Eastern cultures, such as East Asians, tend to use a holistic thinking style that focus on the overall pattern of things and how they exist in relationship with other things.

These cultural differences in thinking style even influence western and eastern people's perceptual experiences. Looking at those two paintings, for example, you can see the Western painting focused on a figure, where the Eastern painting portrays the overall environment rather than a central object or person. When investigating this phenomenon in laboratories, researchers found, when presented with a complex thing with a main object, Westerners eyes focused more on the main objects, while East Asian eyes shift to the background environment.