Multi-cultures, multi-differences

As “globalism” becomes an accepted reality national borders are meaning less and less. While cultures increasingly intermingle the question is; are we different at all, or is culture really only skin deep? According to a new study, there are some real differences between people from different cultures in how they see other people.

The study had European-American and Asian-American subjects undertake a task wherein they were asked to memorise faces and behaviours. For instance, they might be shown a woman’s face and be told that she checks the fire alarms every night before bed.

In a second phase of the study the researchers measured the subject’s brain wave patterns while they were shown the woman’s face followed by the words “courageous” and “brave”. In the European-Americans there was a flash of brain activity that indicated surprise, but there was no such activity in the Asian-Americans. The Europeans had inferred, based on the woman checking the fire alarms, that she was not courageous but was cautious or neurotic . The Asians had not made this inference.

In previous research similar findings had emerged. Seeing someone give up a seat on a train led Europeans to think that the person was nice whereas the Asians thought that it was a social norm and did not infer anything about the individual’s personality.

This building body of evidence suggests that there are deep cultural differences in how we think and interpret the world.

None of this is about good and bad, or one being better than another; that kind of thinking is for the playground (and probably is not adequate there either).

This is about culture being more than skin deep; people from different cultures have some basic differences in how they see the world. We should not seek to deny that difference and paint ourselves into a homogenous whole. It is harder to hold an ambiguity in your thought than to adopt a stark generalisation such as “we are all the same”. Yet it is tolerating that ambiguity and in acknowledging and understanding the differences between us that we can truly get outside our own terms of reference and come together. As philosophers have noted; it is through the crack in the egg that growth occurs.

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