Cultural Perception

[Mr. Beef]

I have lately been intrigued by the relationship between culture and perception.
According to studies, there seem to be marked differences in the way different cultures perceive the world not only philosophically but physically. These differences are most prominent between Eastern and Western culture. It's likely that most cultural perception is indeed a result of cultural conditioning, but it's also possible that different races are genetically prone to different styles of thinking and that their culture is a result of their perceptual style, not vice versa. Also, I'd like to see a study done on Amerindians, who tend to focus on completeness with nature and respect for the environment (which is similar to eastern thought). If you're interested:


In a nutshell, they tested asians and americans using a battery of situations. Asians tended to literally focus their eyes (and perception) on contextual information and relation between objects and background.



http://www2.psych.cornell.edu/cutting/courses/nisbett&miyamoto.pdf

[TelecomClone]

According to studies, there seem to be marked differences in the way different cultures perceive the world not only philosophically but physically.
Yes. I've been partial to Chomsky's theory of linguistic relativism in regards to this issue for several years. Almost all of us think predominantly in language. A person's native language is full of concepts and syntax that may or may not exist in another - something that is easy to express in English, for instance, might be difficult to express in Maori and vice versa. This is especially salient when dealing with emotion and the emotional context/significance of specific acts. Since different languages also tend to be logically arrayed quite differently, people are literally thinking in different orders and thus prone to different patternfinding trends, different ideas of what is concrete and what isn't, and differing perceptions of the world. Culture springs from language, and so culture is also rooted in this effect.





it's also possible that different races are genetically prone to different styles of thinking
Hardly (http://forums.intpcentral.com/showthread.php?t=10101).

[Lee]

"one of the basic assumptions about human cognition and perception has been that information processing machinary is fixed and universal. However, the evidence we have reviewed suggests that cognitiove and perceptual are constructed in part through participation in cultural practices. The cultural environment, both social and physical, shapes perceptual processes"

Who exactly believes that "information processing machinary is fixed and universal"? I have never even read such a radical claim, I believe this may be attacking the lesser and substantially more reasonable theory that kinds of information processing machinary is universal.

I have never heard anyone claim the perceptual processing machinary is fixed, of course we learn and can shift our mental view of the world, like those pictures which craft a larger image out of the arrangment of smaller imagery, where we can mentally shift between seeing the old lady and or the young woman in a dress.

Frankly the psychologists who performed this study have failed to clarify whether these differences are quantative or qualitive, is the information processing using the same mechanism, but simply trained to excel at holistic or analytic perception? or are there two different information processing mechanisms, one for more holistic perception and one for more analytic perception, such as the commonly cited differences between the left anf right hemispheres?

Culture does of course affect how people think, western culture and eastern culture place different demands upon people, western culture tends to place more value upon content-independent analytic thinking, while eastern culture tends to place more value upon content-dependent holistic thinking, is it any surprise that people form habits in how they think?

The psychologists even stated that temporary changes in perceptual style can be observed as people move between cultures, indeed people can practically flip a switch and change between the two. This suggests that the differences are born from two alternative information processing mechanisms that we all have, but likely apply unevenly through habit.

This isn't really surprising, have you ever seen a map of the brains visual system? it's a complex net of connections, all kinds of discrete portions of the brain performing different kinds of processing in order to generate that peculiar thing we call perception, it would be no suprise that perceptual styles frequently called upon different parts of the brain, as the old neursocientist rhyme goes "neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that fire out of sync lose their link." Or in other words, cultures are obviously different and placeupon people different kinds of problems, habitual use of one style of thinking over another may simply slant all perception in that direction.

There is no reason why we should reject the idea that there are universal information processing mechanisms, brain structure is pretty fixed, the microstruture is alterable through culture and learning, but except in rare cases of mental disability, people differ quantatively, not qualitively, we all have the same kinds of information processing, but our genes and environment regulate their quantative expression.

As for genes, there may be something that slightly slants some groups more in this direction than others, but I doubt you'll find anything substantial and that can't be easily overriden environmental and societal pressures.

[Mr. Beef]

Hardly.


This is quite a bit different. Lee was arguing that genomes can be misleading because a slight difference (two percent) can lead to a major difference in phenotypical expression. This doesn't mean that it isn't possible (not that it's likely given the study based on asian-americans) that asians actually have genes that effect their quantitative perception. There are millions and millions of genes, this means that they could have only a few thousand different perceptual genes and have large differences in phenotypical expression (quantitatively). It's commonly regarded that asians (including asian americans) excel at spatial ability (based on Raven's Progessive Matrices, a culture-free test). Saying that it's impossible for asians to have an innately different perception is not unlike saying that it's impossible for them to have quantitatively different spatial ability. Both are mental traits. I agree that it's absurd to think that there are general qualitative physiological differences between the brains of asians and whites, but it's not absurd at all to think that there's a possibility that there are racial genes for quantitative perceptual ability, just as there are for spatial, verbal, and other abilities.
It's possible that their culture also resulted from quantitative perceptual differences, and not vice versa.




Culture does of course affect how people think, western culture and eastern culture place different demands upon people, western culture tends to place more value upon content-independent analytic thinking, while eastern culture tends to place more value upon content-dependent holistic thinking, is it any surprise that people form habits in how they think?



It's not really too surprising, but it's worth mentioning. What actually IS surprising is that the differences are so clear and defined that they can be witnessed in the way caucasians and asians physically interperet a picture. In one study, scientists tracked the eye movements of white and asian subjects as they looked at a picture of a tiger using motion trackers. They found that white students eyes tended to physically focus on the center....there were literally less motion lines picked up by the infrared scanner. With asians, the lines generally followed a more erratic path, jumping from place to place and sometimes even forming a polygon around the central object. Until recently it was thought that different cultures simply had different life philosophies that depended on how their culture conditioned them to interpret and think about information (which is obvious...you could get that to a smaller degree just by growing up in a rural area rather than an urban neighborhood), rather than actual physical perception (less obvious).