AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS _____ Cross-Cultural Perspective EDWARD C. STEWART AND MILTON I. BENNEH --------- ----------------------R E V I S E D I N T E B. C A Sichoias EDIT I O N ultubal press Brealey Puhliihing Company BOSTON • LONDON — First published by Intercultural Press, a Nicholas Brealey Publishing Company. For information, contact: Intercultural Press, Inc. Nicholas Brealey Publishing Nicholas Brealey Publishing 53 State Street, 9th Floor Boston, MA 02109, USA Tel; 617-263-1834 Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y ODZ Tel; 020 3122 6000 www.nicholasbrealey.com © 1972 Edward C. Stewart ©1991 Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett ISBN: 978-1-877864-01-8 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of b • quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 22 23 24 25 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Edward C. American cultural patterns / by Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett.—Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-877864-01-3 I. United States—Euvilization—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Na­ tional characteristics, American—Cross-cultural studies. I. Bennett, Milton J. II. Title. E169.I.S836 1991 973—dc20 91-4256 CIP CHAPTER TWO CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING In everyday small talk among Americans, the subject of perception repeatedly crops up. American conversation is sprinkled with words such as "see," "hear," and "perceive." People will say "I hear that...," or someone may ask, "What do you see happening now?" A common statement is "I saw what was coming next." The number and variety of references to perception and its synonyms suggest that the concept is diffuse and ambiguous. Americans speaking in English use the concept with two distinct meanings. For instance, if a hiker out on a trek says, "From the mountain, I saw the village in the valley," perception is an observation in which physical features of the world register in the brain. But when the same hiker then says, "I saw that it was time to turn back and descend to the village," perception is like a judgment, referring to an appraisal of a situation. Based on these observations, we can see that human perception re­ sembles a janus-like figure consisting of two faces, one looking inward and one looking outward (Platt 1968, 63-64). The inward-looking face is associated with subjective processes of perceiving and thinking such as per­ spective, intuition, opinions, and beliefs. The outward-looking face moni­ tors features of the physical world and registers sensory impressions of objects which in the case of "vision," for instance, are attributes such as shape, color, texture, and size. The outward face of perception is objec­ tive; only imperceptibly does it shade off into the subjective and inward face. Table 1 is a visual rendition of the perception/thinking process. 17 18 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS We have adopted an old convention to analyze the three principal mental processes depicted in the table: sensing, perceiving, and think' ing. Within this tradition, sensing and perceiving are at the surface and relate to apprehension of the external world while thinking takes on depth as in the expression "deep thoughts." Actually, perception MeS between sensation and thought and links them, and it is in this linking that the human mental process manifests its Janus-like nature—with one face glancing outward toward the surface while the second face looks inward, "buried in thought." The fourth and deepest process, encoding or the creation of symbol systems, merges with thinking but also suggests a special thought' driven use of percepts for communication—as in the sounds of a Beethoven symphony, the visual imagery of the Statue of Liberty, and the signs of written English. With mathematics, the last traces of surface or sensory stimuli have vanished. The four processes, listed in the right-hand column in Table 1, have counterparts in structure listed in the left-hand column. Beginning with sensation at the surface, proceeding to perception, cognition, and ending with symbol systems, each structure closely parallels the four processes in column three. Our focus will be on how the structure and processes are manifest in the product, column two. CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING Representation of Human Experience Table 1. s • u PROCESS PRODUCT STRUCTURE Sensation 19 ^ 1 • Sensory Stimuli R • F • Sensing A • C • Perception Percept Perceptual Objects Images Concepts Perceiving Thought/ Cognition Patterns of Thinking Thinking Complex Symbol Systems Pictorial Style Musical Form Language Mathematics Encoding/ Symbolizing Deep Mind This asks deep thought: an eye within the mind, Keen as a diver salving sunken freight, To sink into the depth, yet searching there. Not lose itself in roving phantasies; That all end well and mischief follow not First for the State, which is our chief concern. Then for ourselves; . . . Aeschylus: "The Suppliant Maidens" (lines 411-417) Translated into Enc.lish verse by 4 G. M. Cookson. E AMERICAN CULTURAL 20 PATTERNS Sensation Human beings live in a world of overwhelming sensations. The human eye is capable of identifying some 7,500,000 distinguishable colors (Geldard 1953, 53). The human ear has been estimated to respond to 340,000 discriminable sounds (Geldard, 24). Smell, taste, touch, pain, and the other senses signal information about physical conditions that are immediately important for survival (see Gregory 1970, 12). Pain, touch, and especially kinesthesis (movement) make us aware of our bodies and of interaction with objects in the environment. But human beings live with only a vague awareness of the waves of stimulation that envelop the sensory organs, are encoded, and eventually reach con­ sciousness. Perception transforms the infinite ambiguity of sensory signals—colors, sounds, tactile sensations—into meaningful objects that we live with—tools, shelter, food, caresses. We are so used to objects, to seeing them wlierever we look, that if is quite difficult to realize that they present any problem. But objects have their existence largely unknown to the senses. We sense them as fleeting visual shades, occasional knocks against the hand, sniffs of smell—sometimes stabs of pain leaving a bruise-record of a too-close encounter. The extraordinary thing is how much we rely on properties of objects which we seldom or never test by sensory experience (Gregory, 11). The above quotation highlights the paradox of perception: from signals received by the physiological sensory organs our mind constructs a realistic world composed of images, thoughts, and feelings, which, in turn, affects how we organize those same signals. The paradox begins with the uncertainty of fleeting sensory stimuli and ends with the objects with which we live and with the expectations that go beyond them. Apparently, the goal of the human visual system is to construct a rigid-image description" of the observed objective world, transforming transient events of sensory stimuli into a world of perceptual objects stable in time and space (Marr 1982, 267, 340, 350). Other sensory operations can be assumed to follow this pattern. Perception The stable world we perceive is built in a succession of perceptual stages through which objective features of the sensory stimuli are encoded in increasingly complex structures of the brain. This encoding occurs first in the perceptual process (see the center column of Table 1) as percepts, perceptual objects, images, and concepts. CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION ANLT THINKING 21 Percepts. Objective perception, or simply perception, is uncon­ scious in the sense that the individual is usually unaware that the process is taking place, responding only to its products appearing in the mind as percepts and then objects. The red splash of color becomes a rising sun, and the sharp cry, an animal enraged. The sensations are transformed into percepts by being organized into figure and ground. We see the sun (figure) against the sky (ground) and hear the animal raging in the forest of the night. (We will return in a moment to discuss the significance of figure/ground.) A percept is what the mind makes of the raw data of sensation. Perceptual Objects. From percepts the mind constructs perceptual objects which are characterized by permanence and represent an adaptation of the organism to its environment. During the brief moments of perceiving, percepts are coupled to perceptual stimuli derived from the senses; but once they are uncoupled, they are lodged in the mind and transformed into a world of perceptual objects stable in generalized time and space. Objects, to a degree, lose associations with specific contexts and specific perspectives of the perceivers. Ambiguity and uncertainty diminish as perceptual objects acquire a reality apart from the conditions of perceiving. Images. Images are internal or cognitive representations of external objects or events, "pictures within the mind" (McConnell 1986, 245). These occur in different forms. "An eye within the mind" or "diver salving sunken freight," both from Aeschylus (see Table 1), serve to illustrate imagination imagery. Our minds manipulate such images detached from "eyes" or "divers." A second kind of image, memory, serves to validate and to generalize percepts. We sense an affinity for a stranger in the crowd. We reconstruct and search memory and soon find an image of an old friend who has features resembling those of the stranger. Memory and imagina­ tion imagery may serve as vehicles for abstractions of thought (see Richardson 1969). Images enter into all patterns of thinking but with considerable variation from person to person. Concepts. A concept is a mental abstraction, usually generalized from specific examples (McConnell, 241), that may serve as a unit of thinking. Concepts (underlying appearance) are deeper than percepts or images. Their distinguishing quality is lack of perceptual content, although they may be defined by imagined percepts as in using the metaphor "deep" for "mind," and "I see" for "understand" or "know." Concepts are used to identify relationships which go beyond mere description. It is at this point that the sensation-driven process of perception shifts to the thought- or concept-driven process of thinking. Although the change of one into the other is imperceptible and continuous, at the extreme ranges, perceiving and thinking are radically different processes. 22 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS Patterns of Thinking. At the cognitive level of deep structure, the products of both sensation-driven and thought-driven processes—per­ cepts, perceptual objects, images, concepts—are selected, categorized, and organized so that the mind extends its mastery of objective reality by creating a cognitive, or subjective, reality where meaning is assigned and relationships elaborated. This involves bringing to bear the stored knowl­ edge (memory), emotional predispositions (feelings/intuition), and sub­ jective thought processes (mindsets) on the continuous influx of new sensory/perceptual data. At the core, thinking is the mental ability to govern adaptation and to search for meaning below the sensation-driven surface and beyond the reach of facts. Since the plunge below the surface to the depths of thought takes only about half a second, object perception is quickly overwhelmed by the subjective processes of thinking. As we probe the depths of the mind, the influence of sensory stimuli diminishes while that of thinking increases. Thus while the sensation-perception-thinking process presents itself as an unbroken strand, a clear distinction can be made between sensation at its surface and the mental activity taking place at the deepest levels. Symbol Systems. The next stage in the mental process is the creation of complex symbol systems which can be encoded and represented in notations, signs, and symbols and shared with others. Pictorial and musical forms (which may also be considered "languages") can be shared universally. Language (communicative) and mathematics (or the "language" of mathematics) can be shared among those who understand them. Pictorial styles appear to integrate visual dimensions of perception into complex symbols which can be compared with the grammar and vocabulary of language and which appear in painting, sculpture, and other visual arts. Musical forms, in a similar fashion, integrate auditory percepts and emotions into harmony, rhythms, and melody which make up a language of music. Language retains links to perception in the form of sounds of speech, but meaning in language is mostly determined by deep, thought-driven processes. These meanings are generally shared within and generate from the community that uses the language. Mathematics involves a genuinely abstract language that exists beyond sensation. Our principal concern here, however, is more with perception and thinking than with symbol systems. Because so many of these processes occur out of our awareness and because they are so heavily influenced by the assumptions and values we learn from our cultural environments, perception and thinking play a central and critical role in shaping the attitudes and determining the behaviors which are special to each culture. It is these attitudes and behaviors, including the assumptions and values on which they are based, that we are examining here and to which we refer as subjective culture. CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 23 The American Model of Perception and Thinking Before we can arrive at an objective appraisal of American patterns of perception and thinking, it is necessary to understand that the distinc­ tion between objective sensation at the surface and more deeply embedded subjective thinking is a culture-based idea. It is not a universal model for the human mental process. The use of "deep" to describe thought was a startling breach of traditional forms of thinking when it first appeared during the fifth century b.c. in ancient Greece, and it has influenced Western, including American, thinking ever since. It is in striking contrast to early Buddhist thinking and to think­ ing patterns which prevail among, for instance, the Chinese and Japa­ nese today. The idea that thought is deep emerges clearly in the works of Heraclitus and of Aeschylus. Heraclitus apparently was the first to use the metaphor of depth to describe thought (Snell 1953, 17-22). It was rapidly adopted by other Greek thinkers and resulted in a significant shift in the Greek paradigm for thinking. Prior to that time Greeks lacked a hinge between the sensory organs and the internal world. The Greek understanding of the external world, as reflected, for instance, in the works of Homer, was confined to concrete instances such as the glint in the eagle's eye, the gleam of sunlight on a helmet, the glistening sweat on the backs of oarsmen, a glimpse of Helen's face, or the glow of embers. Human relations were also seen as surface in the form of obligations, duties, and relations among people. The metaphors of Homer were more horizontal than vertical, referring to size, extent, or number, including ranking. Homer lacked the lexical means for direct expression of qualities such as friendship and thinking which are not readily represented in surface metaphors. Achilles and Ulysses did not weigh alternatives and reach decisions, since there was no personal agency to make choices. Instead, victory or defeat, life or death, were determined by the balance of Zeus and by the intervention of fate in the form of gods and goddesses (see Snell, 1-18). The change in paradigm, which connected the external world to the processes of deep thought, was captured by Aeschylus in his earliest surviving play. The Suppliant Maidens. When King Pelasgus is compelled to decide the fate of the suppliants, he says: Surely there is a need of deep and salutary counsel; need for a keen-sighted eye, not o'ermuch confused, to descend like some diver, into the depths, that to the State above all things this matter may work no mischief, and may come to a fair issue for ourselves...(Smyth 1956, 45). 24 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS Thus was the new paradigm given timeless expression. A translation the passage into English verse is given in Table 1. The ancient Greek notion of mind that we now call deep structure ar\d the affirmation of its individual locus of judgment and decision making are firmly in place in American culture. It is the material stability of tlye physical world yielded by thought-driven patterns of perception ar\d thinking that stands out in American cultural thought. An examination of Buddhist ideas of perception—which still affect thinking in areas of Asja where Buddhism has been strong—will help bring into sharper focus the distinctive features of American ways of thinking. In India, it is the fugitive uncertainty of perception which has be^n singled out as the core of experience. The early Buddhists in India took perception as central to knowledge (Jayatilleke 1963, 428). They seized upon fugitive sensations as the keystone of their thought, describing the sensible world as made up of momentary flashes of energy (Stcherbatsky 1962, 79). Sensation was but the reflex response to those flashes. These Buddhists believed that only the first moment could be known directly before it was annihilated. The present moment alone was captured by sensation, not the preceding nor the following one. The reality of that single moment was unutterable; it existed outside conceptual determina­ tion and beyond words {Stcherbatsky, 186). The stability of the objective world was an illusion born of words that were inherently separated fropn reality. The use of sensory evidence to support concepts about reality waS of no value (Nakamura 1964,140) since the sensation, the ultimate reality, was instantaneous and could not generate the permanence of the physical world. Stability in time and space, the Buddhists reasoned, was a construc­ tion of the imagination (Stcherbatsky, 80-83). This view of perception influenced the way Buddhists ordered their knowledge about the world and life. Their perceptual theory minimized the distinction between direct sensory information and knowledge obtained through fantasy or inference, inducing them to treat perceptual objects and mental products similarly. Concrete objects and abstract concepts were situated side by side on a single dimension, and abstract ideas could be represented as concrete objects. The objective world was exhaustively described but without the rank ordering which West­ erners impose on reality by classifying objects and events according to their importance (Nakamura, 130-33). These contrasts in conception are evident when the contemporary thought patterns of Americans are compared with those of the Chinese or Japanese. The American proverb, "still waters run deep," (as a way of describing a quiet, thoughtful person) would be rendered differently by the Chinese. In Mandarin, a profound thinker would be described as "great" or "valuable" rather than deep. Also, in Japanese, horizontal CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 25 allusions to size, rank, or multiplicity more often render the quality of thought than vertical allusions to depth. Both for the Chinese and Japanese, the thinking process is seen as much less deep than it is by Americans and other Westerners. External social roles and relation­ ships, for instance, receive much more emphasis than the nature of one's thought processes. Put differently, the Chinese and Japanese tend to have a highly developed sociological sense but make relatively little use of psychological analyses. The difference between Buddhist and Western approaches to per­ ception appear in the distinction between operations of the brain. The process of sensation may be roughly equated to an analog device such as a clock which to a degree can represent functions and objects directly (Gregory 1970, 162-66). Such sensations as those of color, for instance, are continuous and, within the scope of the eyes, practically infinite. Sensations are representative of the physical stimuli, the wave lengths which produce sensations. But sensations are transformed into percepts and eventually into objects and images—the constructed sym­ bols; and a system such as language comes to resemble digital devices. In the words of Gregory, So we are forced to the conclusion that the brain is biologically an analog system. With the development—or invention—of language man's biologically analog brain can work in a digital mode. This is so remarkable that we can hardly begin to understand it (163). It seems clear that the Buddhist view of perception and thought stresses the analog functions of the brain—the fugitive sensations that flow from bursts of energy which constitute the elusive remains of a brief reality. The Western view of perception emphasizes the digital symbolization of percepts that form the basis for the permanence we attribute to the world. The idea that the world is continuous, stable, and material derives from the interaction between sensory perception of objective stimuli and abstract contributions from the brain itself. Hu­ man beings resolve the paradox of a stable world composed of fleeting percepts by integrating these two modes in everyday experience. But if this is a universal process, what is the source of cultural differences in patterns of thinking? One answer lies in the way people in different cultures order the world of sensations they receive by creating category boundaries, that is, classifying, categorizing, sorting, and storing the sensations. Central to this process is the principle of figure and ground. Figure and ground can be explained with a simple demonstration. When we draw a closed ring on a blank piece of paper and then look at it, we see a circle, that is, the space inside the ring and not simply the ring described by the line itself. This space inside the ring, which may 26 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS now be seen as the figure, seems to be raised above and to have more texture than the space outside the ring, which is now the ground. The same figure/ground relation appears if we draw three straight lines and connect them at their end points. We see a triangle. Figure/ground organization is a general principle which applies to all percepts and in part defines what is meant by transformation from sensation to percep­ tion. Second, the transformation of sensation flux into figure/ground is also an example of a digital symbolization of fleeting visual shapes of analog perception. Although the interpretation of figure and ground is a biological function of creating percepts, at a practical level the perception may display the influence of experience. For instance, it is difficult for the tourist walking on the beaches in Guam to identify a stone used as a tool by the early inhabitants of the island. At first, all stones look alike. It takes some experience before the novice learns to identify by appear­ ance those stones that may be old tools. Although the organization of sensory signals into perceptions of figure and ground is natural for everyone, identifying the specific object perceived will usually be affected by learning from one's environment. Cultural differences are found almost exclusively in the subjective processes of interpretation, in the way something is thought about rather than in objective perception. Thinking at this level can be seen as the construction of category boundaries that define figure/ground ob­ jects, transforming them into perceptual objects. An almost literal example of this process occurs in the training of an airplane pilot, who must learn to distinguish the figure of an airstrip from the ground sur­ rounding it. (It may distress the reader to know that this is often a difficult task.) In addition, category boundaries define the extent to which a figure is subcategorized. For instance, when skiers inspect snow before the day's run, they will subcategorize it into various types: light powder, medium-packed, corn, etc. The distinction among these types will probably escape nonskiers, who simply perceive snow. Most particular boundary constructions are learned, and culture is an important factor in this learning. Culture guides us in what to consider "figure." Micronesians, for example, are far more likely than Americans to see wave patterns—interactions of tide and current on the ocean surface that are used for navigation. To a typical American, the ocean is just "ground," and only boats or other objects are "figure." But this same American may single out an automobile sound as indicating imminent mechanical failure, while to the Micronesian it is simply part of the background noise. In general, culture engenders in us the tendency to perceive phenomena that are relevant to both physical and social survival. In terms of cultural differences, the critical point to grasp, of CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 27 course, is that what is "figure" or important to one culture may be "ground" to another. Perceptual boundaries are mutable. For instance, children who speak Trukese, a Micronesian language, do not make a distinction between blue and green. One word, araw, refers to both colors, and is the response to both "What color is the sea?" and "What color is the grass?" Yet these children routinely learn to perceive the difference in color as part of their training in English as a second language. The mutability of perceptual boundaries supports the idea that organizing stimuli into categories is a psycho-cultural activity rather than an automatic physiological process. The boundaries used to categorize stimuli, such as those indicated by the words green and blue, are not arbitrary and free-floating interpreta­ tions. Boundary markers belong to a system of representation possessing its own structure. In English, for instance, blue and green are abstract adjectives which can be used as metaphors for emotional experiences as in a "blue mood" or "green with envy." The power of blue and green to express emotion derives from both the symbolism associated with the colors they represent and from their privileged position in the English language as abstract qualifiers. A word used to represent an object affects the perception of similar objects. The representation of perceptual features is in subtle ways affected by language rather than by the object itself. Perception is distorted to accommodate to the structure—vocabulary, grammar, style—of the language. But the reverse also happens. There is an accommodation in which the language may be stretched to fit perception. An example occurs with the analog perception of the natural world in continuous gradations and variations. Blue gradually merges into green since no boundary exists that clearly separates them. But language itself establishes discrete categories. There is no ambiguity between the words green and b/ue but when these two labels are applied to represent the hues of sea, sky, or palms, ambiguous areas of the continuum—blue-green, green-blue—make accurate description more difficult. These ambiguous areas usually receive longer names (aquamarine vs. blue; emerald vs. green); observers react more slowly to them and disagree in identifying them (Roger Brown 1958, 241). Variations in how the perception of the continuum of the environment is differentiated may contribute to difficulties in intercultural communica­ tion since the areas of the continuum that are ambiguous are suppressed and become a source of anxiety. The words used to represent the sup­ pressed areas may be charged with meaning unperceived by a stranger to the culture and its language. In the words of Leach, "Language gives us the names to distinguish the things; taboo inhibits the recognition of those parts of the continuum which separate the things..." (1964, 35). Evidence for this theory is apparent in the classification of animals in English. 28 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS Animals fit into four classes according to their social distance from humans: pets, tame farm animals, field animals or game, and remote wild animals. Leach points out that those animals that don't neatly fit the classification receive special attention. The dog, for instance, is not only pet but also tame farm animal (the shepherd dog, for instance), and wild animal. As a pet, the dog belongs to the class of "not food" for English speakers although in other parts of the world the dog is raised for food. Dogs also serve as the source of verbal abuse in phrases such as "son of a bitch." Leach writes: In seventeenth century English witchcraft trials it was very commonly asserted that the Devil appeared in the form of a Dog; i.e.. Cod, backwards. In England, we still employ this same metathesis when we refer to a clergyman's collar as a "dog collar" instead of a "God collar" (27). Other animals sharing the ambiguity of the dog are the cat, horse, ass, goat, pig, rabbit, and fox. These animals "appear to be specially loaded with taboo values, as indicated by their use in obscenity and abuse by meta^ physical associations or by the intrusion of euphemism (Leach, 41). The observation that perceptual category boundaries are learned and are arrived at by subjective processes of interpretation which lead to different experiences of reality contradicts the natural view of Ameri' cans that one lives according to a specific, objective reality. In fact, th^ perceiver responds to culturally influenced categorizations of stimuli. Tocategorize is to render discriminably different things equivalent, to group the objects and events and people around us into classes, and to respond to them in terms of their class membership rather than their uniqueness (Bruner, Coodnow, and Austin 1956, 1). The construction of boundaries produces images and concepts which classify the content of our experience and provide a means of coping with the complexity of perception. Although cultural differences are found in the natural categories which represent physical perception and images, their overall significance is slight when compared with the abstract artificial categories of thought-driven processes. Differences in Style of Thinking The continuum between sensory perception and abstract symbolism (as provided in Table 1) provides a rigorous framework for examining differences in thinking and in values across cultures. For example, Americans tend to focus on functional, pragmatic applications of think­ ing; in contrast, the lapanese are more inclined to concrete description. CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 29 while Europeans stress abstract theory. As a result, Japanese thinking would seem to be much closer to the perception end of the continuum than American thought, and European thinking would lie further toward the symbolic end. This is as expected since description (Japanese) is linked to the sensory aspects of perception while function (American) is tied to central processing of perceptual data, and theory (European) is linked to symbol systems and is most distant from immediate perception. It is likely that a way of thinking close to the perception end of the continuum would be particularly adept at attaching meaning to the immediately perceived events, and such seems to be the case with the Japanese. Japanese thought is as close to analog perception as any other defined pattern of thinking. As might therefore be expected, the Japanese are typically more sensitive than Americans to nonverbal behavior, an analog form of communication. They have a searching perception that notices the appearance of people, what they do, and how they do it. Americans, on the other hand, are not noted for their perceptual skills. They rely much more than do the Japanese on digital, verbal messages, and they usually display more interest in how to get things done than in who is doing it. Americans, while drawing inductively on a perceptual world of objective things and events, construct a moderately abstract functional reality rather than a concrete perceptual one. Americans going abroad are inclined to respond to the similarities they meet rather than the differences. Searching for the familiar and failing to recognize cultural differences, they may interpret clashing styles of thinking as social conflict. In the incident reported below, a conflict in styles of thinking between a group of Americans and a British engineer creates an impasse which is misinterpreted and projected to the social level of human interaction. Twenty executives were brought together to participate in a training program. The executives were members of a large American corporation; they had been drawn from the northeastern part of the United States. One or two had been hired from other companies, and one was an Englishman recently arrived from abroad. The training program was designed so they could become acquainted with each other before beginning the process of setting policy for a new plant built by the corporation in the southern part of the United States. As preparation for one of their training sessions, they had read a recent book on management techniques. During the session they discussed its content so as to clarify their own policies on management. The group quickly became polarized. The majority of the American managers occupied one position (a few remained silent) while the British engineer—highly trained and experi­ enced—took an opposite position in the discussion. As the managers talked, their language became more heated and the comments more 30 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS personal. The Americans used words and phrases such as "cost-benefit," "productivity," "making a profit," "making the best use of your time," and "change." The British engineer frequently insisted that he did not under­ stand what the Americans were talking about. He repeatedly emphasized the necessity of knowing the specific context in which a given working situation or problem had arisen. He emphasized his own experience as a trained engineer and how, out of his training and experiences, he had been able to develop concepts and rules-of-thumb that he could apply to new situations as they arose. He felt it was relatively futile to attempt to predict the highly general and vague possibilities that the managers might encounter in their new plant; these were meaningless issues to him. The Americans in this example were exhibiting a characteristic pattern of thinking which is inductive and operational. Heavy emphasis is placed on efficiency but little attention is paid to the overall frame­ work in which one's actions take place. Future projections are made and criteria for measuring success considered, but they are generally embodied in operational principles involving benefit ratios, profit mar­ gins, and the like. In this case, they were agreeing on policies based on a rational response to objective facts which they interpreted according to a set of predetermined operating principles. In contrast, the British engineer was specific in his search for guidance from his own ideas and past experience. He wanted to consider concrete instances to which to apply his theories and to avoid adopting the general principles of the Americans which he considered vague anticipations of the future. He judged that the Americans were concerned with uncertain generalities which might not come about, that their thinking was unclear, and that their use of language was confusing. For their part, the Americans judged the Englishman to be obnoxious, antagonistic, and disruptive to tFie harmonious working of the group. Neither the Englishman nor his Ameri­ can colleagues recognized the source of their difficulty. The cultural differences in patterns of thinking were readily projected to personal and unfavorable characteristics of individuals, who were then assigned disrup­ tive social motives. The American View of Facts From the case study, we conclude that American thinking is more closely oriented to action and getting things done than to the "direct perception of impermanent forms." Americans focus on operational procedures rather than perceptions of the situation. This way of think­ ing is rational, Americans believe, and efficient. The connection to perception, as defined earlier, is that Americans assume that rational CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 31 thinking is based on an objective reality where measurable results can be attained. This cultural orientation provides one of the principal keys to understanding the American pattern of thinking. It is the American view of "fact." The significance of this key can be illustrated by a personal experience of one of the authors in South Korea. The writer visited the demilitarized zone north of Seoul which separates South Korea from North Korea and entered the tunnels which the North Koreans had dug through the mountains. When the military command in South Korea discovered the underground passageways, they reasoned that if the tunnels had not been discovered in time to prevent the North Koreans from launching a surprise attack, Seoul would have been under severe military threat. After the visit, the writer spoke with an American army colonel in military intelligence who was stationed in Korea. In response to a question, the colonel said that eighteen months before the discovery of the tunnels, the intelligence officers had enough information in hand to conclude that the North Koreans were digging through the mountains. When asked to explain the eighteen-month delay, the colonel answered that most of the intel­ ligence information was collected by South Korean foot soldiers patrol­ ling the mountains and consisted of reports that there were sounds coming from the earth and that the ground was shaking. The colonel said that those reports were considered "imagery" and "gossip" of a kind often obtained from South Koreans and were not given any weight. When the Koreans asked the Americans what they should do to be taken seriously, the American consensus was that "imagery" should be transformed into "facts." First, the source of the information needed to be objectively identified; the patrols should be assigned numbers. Next, the sounds should be measured on some scale—from one to ten, for instance. Sound could range on this scale from a murmur to a clap of thunder overhead. The shaking could run from a slight shudder to an earthquake. When reporting these facts, the information should include the time and the position of the patrol when the observation was made. If these conditions had been met, the Korean gossip or imagery could not have been ignored by American intelligence. From the episode of the tunnels, we can derive several qualities of American patterns of thinking in contrast to Korean. Americans sepa­ rate perceptual content which is "objective" and hence measurable from that which is only "imagery." Also, Americans appear to employ a specialized category for information that excludes information by word of mouth or gossip, while the Koreans do not. These observations illustrate some particular aspects of the American concept of fact. First, facts possess perceptual content; they are empirical, observ­ able, and measurable. Second, facts are reliable so that different ob­ W 32 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS servers will agree about them. Third, facts are objective and therefore valid. They are impersonal and exist separately from perceptual pro­ cesses and from observers. In American thinking, facts exist in the external world and not inside the mind. Fourth, both the reliability and validity of facts are associated with measurements using coordinates of time and space, leading Americans to speak of "historical but not "future" facts. Americans also say "as a matter of fact," and refer to local or particular facts but not general facts, which would strip the concept of its meaning. Despite these assumptions about facts, Americans are also quite comfortable engaging in counterfactual speculations where a false identity, action, or event is used to gain insight or information of some sort. In interviews, Americans will often use a hypothetical question such as "If you were the president, what would you do about the threat of a nuclear power plant explosion?" American facts, their quantification, and the counterfactual mode of thought are avoided in other cultures. The Chinese apparently use counterfactual thinking sparingly if at all. The French and the Indians stoutly resist counterfactual speculation in interviewing, apparently sensing a manipulation of their own personal identities. We can only conclude that the American conception of facts and the use of counterfactual thinking are not universal. American Pragmatism American thinking distinguishes between the internal world of thought and the external world of action but emphasizes operations such as decision making that straddle the two. American mental formations favor what is called procedural knowledge, which focuses on how to get things done. In contrast, Germans favor declarative knowledge, which consists of descriptions of the world (Ryle 1949). The American approach is functional and emphasizes solving problems and accomplishing tasks. The measure of success I ies in the consequences of concept-driven action. This distinctive functional style is embodied in American pragmatism. Pragmatism lacks the theoretical commitment that Edmund Glenn identi­ fies with the Russians (1981, 80) and the perceptual commitment of the Japanese, lying somewhere in between. The American drive to attain impact has led to the cultivation of a variety of approaches to problem solving, decision making, and conflict resolution intended to avoid the deficiencies of intuition and common sense. Pragmatism employs psy­ chology, game theory, and mathematics to channel human thinking and judgment into applications. This technical approach to human behavior. CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 33 sometimes called technicism (Stanley 1978, 200), is deeply embedded in the c onsciousness of most Americans, many of whom mistakenly consider it universal. It clearly is not, as indicated by the fact that the Japanese and other cultures lack this prototype of conceptual decision making. The concepts of alternatives, probability and criterion, to mention three that we shall discuss, mean something very different to the Japanese than they do to Americans. When selecting a course of action, the Japanese seldom consider alternatives systematically. Instead, they are more likely to arrive intu­ itively at one course of action. The difference between the Japanese and American approaches is illustrated in the following episode which illustrates the different attitudes of the American and the Japanese toward planning in general. A Japanese and an American administrator were planning a program for a group of visitors who were arriving in Tokyo from overseas. The American collected cost information on four different places where the visitors could be lodged during their one-week visit. These were a business hotel, a guest house, a dormitory (or similar lodgings), and an apartment complex. He weighed the advantages of each according to convenience, accessibility of transportation, food, etc. against the different prices involved. He then showed the results to his Japanese colleague. The Japanese looked at the figures and asked how they were going to stay at four different places at the same time. The American answered that of course they were not going to stay at four different places. The figures were simply a feasibility study. His colleague replied, "We also do feasibility studies, but most often we just pick the best one, and we do that very well." The use of probability has seeped through American culture to a degree unknown to the Japanese and others. When Westerners coop­ erate with Japanese in technical areas, a number of conceptual gaps can arise to produce misunderstandings and tensions. Two examples given below illustrate some of these difficulties. Both episodes occurred in Japan in the course of conducting research with Japanese and Western technical companies. An American manager, situated in Tokyo, receivedanorder for his company's products produced at a plant three hours away by train. He knew that the plant was running near full capacity, but he decided to call his plant manager, an excellent Japanese engineer trained in a leading Japanese university, and ask him for his estimate of how long it would take to fill the order. The Japanese declined to give an answer. The American pressed for an estimate but failed to persuade the Japanese to respond. The 34 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS Stand-off led to tension between the two men, which came out weeks later when they accidentally met face-to-face in a training session and discussed the situation with assistance from the trainer. The Japanese explained his response or lack of response by saying that, for him, numbers represented countdowns, commitments to deliver. The American understood his position but said that he had only been asking for a "guesstimate," not a commitment. The American was comfortable using data to estimate probable but indeterminate out­ comes. The Japanese was not. This episode conveys a fundamental difference in how Americans and Japanese work with measurements, probability, and plans. It is particularly important because it demonstrates again how these kinds of differences are often interpreted as interpersonal conflict. American technicism includes a readiness to speculate freely with numbers. Amer­ ican production figures, for example, are often reported as a percentage of the full capacity of the plant, and they invariably include small errors. Japanese production figures are strictly counts of actual units produced. The same difference holds in the area of quality control. In the American system, product samples are inspected and the results used to generalize about the quality of the total production. This is also an example of technicism—the use of statistics and probability to increase efficiency. The Japanese adopt the attitude of craftsmen and insist on quality inspection for each item produced, making an inspection of samples irrelevant. Responsibility for Japanese quality control naturally falls to the production line and to each individual worker. The Japanese manager in the above episode acted in the best Japanese style. First, he did not share with the American uncertainties of planning for the order; Japanese typically do not discuss their plans until after the countdown. Second, he would not commit himself to deliveries based on probability rather than countdowns. Therefore, he was caught in a difficult cultural predicament. A second episode presents a technical view of speculation, prob­ ability, and risk analysis. The incident was reported by a Scandinavian assigned to survey and approve the construction of a ship contracted to a Japanese ship-building company. The surveyor, who was working with the Japanese, identified a structural problem in the design of the ship. He insisted that a horizontal component of the structure be changed from a rectangular to a triangular shape to improve the distribution of forces on the vertical components of the structure. The Japanese responded by accumulating an enormous amount of data supporting their design, which they brought to the surveyor a few CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 35 days later. Overwhelmed by the data, he approved the design presented by the Japanese. Nevertheless, the surveyor remained uneasy, believing that the metal in the ship's structure would develop fissures after some years of service because of metal fatigue. Later, the surveyor recognized that the Japanese cal­ culations had taken into account normal functioning but had not included risk analysis and had specifically omitted speculations about long-term metal fatigue. The Japanese considered it superfluous to conduct experiments to test the design. If the design was as good as its representation in the drawings, they expected the ship to be good. Their approach to safety consisted of a refined and detailed examination, but their testing ordinarily omitted speculations about improbable conditions that would test the limits of the technology. The Scandinavian surveyor, with expe­ riences in the tempestuous North Sea, was more willing to speculate about unusually severe conditions. This Scandinavian surveyor's experience would probably be very similar to that of an American technician placed in the same position. On the surface there appears to be miscommunication or perhaps an effort to cut corners, but the deep message is another story. The American (and in this case Scandinavian) approach to probability and the analyses of risk differ from that of the Japanese. If we consider the differences in the context of patterns of thinking, we can see that the Japanese attitude is compatible with perceptual thinking, while the Western attitude is functional and based more on abstract consider­ ations. The use of speculations and probability in risk analysis requires a strong commitment to find out what will happen if certain conditions are fulfilled, which by assumption are possible but improbable. This attitude is unduly abstract for a mental disposition inclined toward rigid and measurable perceptions. We have introduced these lengthy episodes and their analyses as evidence that the American pattern of thinking directs American actions along very different channels from those of the Japanese (and others), even when it involves technical personnel working with abstractions such as probability. The Japanese, relying on perceptual thinking, choose to work with the certainty of precedents and rules—even those of bureaucracies—rather than with probability. The operational cast of American (and European) thought apparent in the preceding discussion places it closer to the symbolic end of the perception/symbolism continuum. For instance, Americans are oriented toward the future, an abstract state of mind lying outside perception. Reliance on a vision of the future may raise doubts about the practicality of American thinking. These doubts, though, can be laid to rest by noting that the temporal aim is toward the near future, making the orientation 36 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS more functional than that in other societies where people orient themselves to a future measured by decades and generations. Second, the future appears in American thinking in the form of anticipated consequences of actions. The projection into the future is conveyed by human intentions and actions rather than by abstract time. Anticipated consequences of actions is a functional concept used in models of decision making and provides a link between thinking and action. We shall return to this subject when we discuss the value of activity. Here it is sufficient to note that the American time orientation represents a midpoint on the continuum__a position that combines some aspects of concrete action with the symbol' ism of abstract probability. The primary content of perceptual thinking has been described here as images that are classified according to such perceptual dimensions as color, shape, size, and position. In American thinking, perceptual dominance yields to functional attributes of what a person can do with things in the form of concepts instead of images (a computer is not just a high tech instrument used for games; it is a high-speed tool used for calculating data). Further along the continuum, operations for classifying objects increase in abstraction and scope until classifications can be based on a single common feature, a criterial attribute (Co\e and Scribner 1974, 10102). Any one system of thought has access to each level of abstraction, but Japanese thinking tends to dwell on complex perceptual attributes and avoids all-encompassing general principles while American thinking reaches for that single dimension, the criterial attribute. Negative Reasoning and Null Logic in American Thought A typical American analysis of a practical issue tends to focus on obstacles that may block courses of action and to consider ways of neutralizing those blockages in advance. These improbable, negative events enter into their thinking as practical forms of arguments known as negative reasoning. In the American cultural context, we shall refer to this way of thinking as null logic. It is this dynamic that explains the American concern with avoiding failure in the future by taking action in the present. Null logic is easily recognized in its applications. It directs preventive programs in technol­ ogy; for instance, parts of aircraft are automatically replaced after a predetermined number of flying hours and before they malfunction. In the area of health, people take a polio vaccine before they succumb to the illness. In education, children may take reading readiness training before they start to learn to read and meet impediments. Safety in industry is based on the analysis of a chain of cause and effect leading to potential accidents. Safety programs are designed to avoid the critical act that causes the CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 37 accident. From an early age, the typical American child learns to avoid acts that bring about undesirable situations and to select those that get around barriers. Much of the content of American functional thinking concerns circumventing barriers to action. Thus, children often learn to avoid failures or poor grades rather than to attain excellence. Analysis consists primarily of what can go wrong and how to avoid it to attain success. American null logic seems to be a variation of a more general pattern of Western negative reasoning. Such reasoning involves the assumption that a claim is not valid until it is proven to be so. The American variation is distinguished by (1) an emphasis on anticipation of consequences in decision making, (2) an intimate association with action, (3) the implicit presence of the problem solver, and (4) the balancing of negativism by optimism based on the belief that hard effort succeeds. These are cher­ ished American prototypes which occupy less room in European negative reasoning where theory and logic enjoy higher status and don't generate the push to "get things done" that is characteristic of Americans. As a consequence, Americans working with the Flemish or the French, for instance, may see their counterparts as cynical, while the Europeans view the Americans as romantic and naive about the ways of the world. Nakamura describes another contrast to American null logic in Indian ways of thinking. Indians display a fondness for negative expressions, preferring to define objects by what they are not. "Non-one" is said for "many or none," and yoga disciples revere five moral precepts; nonviolence, sincerity, nontheft, chastity, and nonacquisition. Three of the five in Sanskrit, flagged with non in English, are expressed in negative form (Nakamura 1964, 52-59). Europeans and Americans prefer positive expressions for defining objects and virtues. The negative perspective at the foundation of this Indian way of classifying objects and concepts appears, we would suggest, in Western science, technology, and behavior in the form of negative reasoning. The American contribution is to render negative reasoning operational in the form of null logic. Thus, at the practical level, Americans cannot always expect warm compliance with their procedures in industry, education, or even health. In many nonWestern cultures null logic isnot a motivating force. Instead, the approach to a course of action proceeds through intuition and painstaking descrip­ tion of actual conditions. The Implied Agent in American Thinking As we have seen, Americans tend to conceive of human activity as problems requiring human agents to find solutions. American problem i 38 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS solving exposes what appears to be the backbone of American culture; a mental orientation toward practical actions which incorporates a subjective point of view. We will call this orientation the implied agent and explain it as the psychological disposition to collect, process, and display information as if an actor or observer were present. In the following example, the implied agent becomes a motorist trying to find his or her way to the airport. Traffic signs in the American city assume that drivers need directions on how to get to certain destinations. For instance, in Washington, D.C., drivers can pick up directional signs miles distant from the destination. Directions are given by signs placed where drivers must make a choice between two or more alternative routes and again where they will inform the drivers that they have made the correct choice. The principle of giving directions to reach the airport seems clear enough, but consider the situation in a japanese city where signs are posted according to a different principle. In Tokyo, drivers on their way to the international airport find that the road is marked for the airport only after the last point of choice is behind and the only possible destination up front is the airport. In this example, American signs help direct drivers to the airport; lapanese signs assure them they have made the correct choice. Ameri­ can signs guide while lapanese signs label. A similar conclusion can be reached with temporary road signs such as those announcing road construction. American signs in principle are placed well ahead of the place where drivers must select an alternative route when a detour is required while signs in Ecuador, Japan, and elsewhere are placed in principle at the site of the construction, where they actually describe the conditions of the road. When drivers read the sign, they have passed the last choice point and have to proceed with caution or stop, turn around, and retrace their path. Although there are many exceptions to these principles of "direc­ tion" and "description," the two seem to serve as prototypes in the United States and in Japan. The American pattern of collecting and conveying information in a way that guides behavior is at the core of the concept of the implied agent. The information conveyed is particu­ lar, action-oriented, causal, and practical. It assumes an agent outside the self and the immediate situation that is capable of observing infor­ mation and acting upon it. This contrasts with the perceptual thinking of the Japanese and others, which maintains a concept of self which is centered in the immediate act of perception. The concept of implied agent provides us with a convenient way of describing the American preoccupation with causation. The idea of a CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 39 "natural happening" or "occurrence" is not familiar or acceptable for Americans as it is for the Chinese and many other non-Westerners. Events do not just occur or happen naturally; they require a cause or an agent that can be held responsible. Americans are not satisfied with statements of occurrence until they have determined who is responsible—who did it or who caused it to be done. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" means that each effect or event has a causative agent. The English language reflects this quality of American (and English) thinking. For example, in English one cannot grammatically refer to a natural occurrence of rain without an agent. Unlike other Romance languages that allow the statement, "Is raining," the English speaker must invent a dummy subject to say, "It is raining." The it in this English statement is the agent. The implied-agent concept extends into most practical areas of American life. For instance, the American strategy of management appears to revolve around answering "why" questions: Why did an individual act as he or she did? Why is a particular objective appropri­ ate? Why did a plan not work (and who is responsible)? An informal study was conducted with an international company in Tokyo, in which Western managers were asked to list the difficulties they had with their Japanese colleagues. Every list contained the complaint that the Japanese do not answer "why" questions. Two examples illustrate the problem. 1. The materials shipped to Japan from the states ordi­ narily arrived at the port of Osaka, where they were quickly passed through customs in about a day or so. But on one occasion the shipment came through Yokohama. The passage through customs took more than three days. The American manager asked his Japanese assistant to go to the port and find out why it had taken so long. The Japanese manager traveled to Yokohama and returned with information about how the shipment had been processed through customs. The American manager was dissatisfied with the information and asked the Japanese assistant to return to Yokohama. While the delay was all right this one time, headquarters had to know the reason for it, and the manager cautioned his assistant that it should not happen again. The Japanese manager once more traveled to the port. When he returned, the American manager received a great deal of information about the passage of the shipment through customs, in­ cluding details about the forms filled out, names of w AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS 40 customs agents, and time schedules for the shipment going through each part of the customs procedure— but still no explanation as to why it had taken so long. Finally the American began to realize that he had run up against something he did not clearly understand. He relented from pressing his Japanese assistant, whose willingness and ability were beyond dispute. In the end, the American decided that there was no real reason for the delay other than the fact that the customs officials in Yokohama were not familiar with the shipments for the company and therefore had conducted customs inspection with punctilious for­ mality. Customs agents in Osaka, on the other hand, were familiar with the periodic shipments, knew the company officers, and therefore passed their ship­ ments through customs rapidly. 2. An American manager arrived at a hotel some twenty minutes before the expected arrival time of his vice president, who was flying in from the States. He checked at the desk and was alarmed to discover that the reservation for his superior had been switched to another hotel. He was angered at the change made without his approval, but he did not immediately attempt to find out why. He dashed to the second hotel, where he met his vice president. Although the second hotel was equal to the first one, the change seemed capricious. He wanted to find out why the switch had been made. Later, he asked his Japanese assistant to inquire. The inquiry soon became bogged down with explanations of procedures on how the reservations were made. The American arrived at the conclusion that his question was not going to be answered, and it was not. These two episodes document the American predilection for "why" answers and the Japanese preference for "what" answers. From the Japanese point of view, the individual should already know "why," and it is a mark of immaturity for one to have to ask. Americans make exactly the opposite judgment, feeling that the "what" is obvious and' mature people should inquire into the underlying "why"—they should discover the agent. At a more fundamental level, Americans like infor­ mation put together in lineal cause-and-effect chains, ideally strung out along a single dimension. In contrast, Japanese prefer increasingly CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 41 refined details without insisting upon logical or lineal links. These detailed expositions probably indicate circular movement in thought, compared to the more straight-line, operational thought of Americans. American Analytical Thinking As we have seen, Americans anticipate future problems by searching for a single factor with which to explain events. This effort demands abstract thought, null logic, and an implied agent of causality. It also demands analysis. Analysis dissects events and concepts into the pieces which can be linked in causal chains and categorized into universal criteria. This kind of thinking stands in contrast to a more integrated approach, sometimes called "holistic" or "synthetic" (from "synthesis"). In comparison to American thought, many other cultures such as Japa­ nese, Chinese, and Brazilian are more synthetic than analytical in think­ ing style. The analytical cast to American thought appears cold and imper­ sonal to many. One of the actions of youth in the 1960s was to turn away from analysis and restore synthesis in their thinking, which seemed more humanistic. But the coldness of analytical thought is mitigated somewhat when we recognize that its mode of operation is through problem solving and the implied agent. Both of these principles intro­ duce subjectivism and human purpose into an otherwise austere reality created by operational analysis. In American culture, emotions have no overt role in thinking. But human subjectivity is nevertheless present, disguised in practical forms such as the implied agent. The style of thinking that derives principles from analysis of data is called inductive. In Western science, the inductive style is represented by the generation of models and hypotheses based on empirical observation. Somewhat aside from traditional science, everyday American inductive thinking is operational, leading to a stress on consequences and results and a disregard for the empirical world as such. What is important is the ability of the individual to affect the empirical world. In contrast to the American operational style of thinking, Europeans tend to attach primacy and reality to ideas and theories. Their deductive and more abstract style of thinking gives priority to the conceptual world and symbolic thinking. Deductive thinkers are likely to have more confidence in their theories than in the raw data of empirical observation, so it suffices for their purposes to show one or two connections between their concepts and the empirical world. They do not feel compelled in the American way to amass facts and statistics. They prefer to generalize from one concept to another, or from concept to facts, by means of logic. They have faith and 42 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS trust in the powers of thought; Americans place faith and trust in metho^jj of empirical observation and measurement. The American way of thinking produces disciplines in the socjgi sciences that are more likely to be empirical and to stress empiri^gj methods in other disciplines than in European countries. Scientifj^work is often seen as confirming and elaborating the organic theories Qf other scientists and philosophers rather than being new. There is 3 tendency for deductive thinkers to consider ideas as organic and living parts of reality. They may consider a new idea to be a "revelation" oc a "discovery," while the more inductive American thinker will considec a concept more in the nature of a "construct" or an "invention" to defined mainly by examples. This difference in styles of thinking rrigy be illustrated by the comment of Don Martindale, an American sociolo­ gist, on the observation by Ferdinand Tbnnies, a European, that "in organic world the concept itself is a living reality." Martindale (19^o, 91) observes that "presumably the concept of a man, like an actual man, gets up in the morning, puts on its pants, shaves, and in otE,er ways prepares for a busy day." These observations of American and European styles of thinking indicate some cultural differences in emphasis that may be associated with intercultural misunderstandings. The crude comparisons suggest that there is a single style characteristic of Americans and another of Eurofjeans. In fact, a third contrasting style—relational thinking—involves a high degree of sensitivity to context, relationships, and status and exists in cultures where the social order approaches a gemeinschaft pattern. Ana­ lytical thinking, by contrast, tends to prevail in societies that, by compari­ son, resemble a gesellschaft pattern. Relational thinking is found in many countries as well as in certain subcultures in the United States. In an important study of conceptual styles, Rosalie Cohen (1969) found in children from low-income American homes a relational pattern of thinking encountered more often in non-Western societies. Cohen defined conceptual styles as "integrated rule-sets for the selection and organization of sense data" and noted that the styles can be defined "without reference to specific substantive content and they are not related to native ability" (841-42). Within each conceptual style, certain assump­ tions and relationships are logically possible and others are not. She found two major styles in the United States: analytical, which we have discussed and which is the dominant pattern of thinking, and relational, a style which is less abstract and more sensitive to the total social context. Perhaps Cohen's most important contribution is the notion that these conceptual styles are associated with different family and friend­ ship structures. People with relational patterns of thinking come from backgrounds in which neither equality among persons nor differentia­ CULTURAL PATTERNS OF PERCEPTION AND THINKING 43 tion of roles are as accentuated as they are in the background of those with analytical patterns of thinking. Culture groups where the analytical type appears are more formally organized; privileges, responsibilities, and status in the groups are distributed in orderly fashion. The individual in these groups has a greater freedom to leave the group and to "refuse to act in any capacity not defined by his job" (Cohen, 853). This conceptual style is identified with the American middle class. On the other hand, relational types are more deeply embedded in their membership groups. They are expected to identify with the group as a whole rather than with formal functions associated with their roles in the group; they have to be ready to act in any capacity at any time. Functions in the group, including leadership, are shared more widely among members than is found with groups composed of analytical persons. These distinctions parallel findings revealed in the study of crosscultural differences, where the demonstration of an association between conceptual style and social organization is significant. Particularly important is Cohen's conclusion that the educational and social insti­ tutions which Americans create are particularly suited to the analytical conceptual style. The social organizations, curricula, pedagogy, and discipline in the schools provide unfavorable environments for the relational conceptual style. This condition may cause difficulties for many foreign and American students in higher education. American instructors who complain that some students lack the ability to think analytically may be encountering the same relational conceptual style found by Cohen among children in low-income families. One of the major differences between analytical and relational styles is how subjectivity is treated. The analytical style separates subjective experience from the inductive process that leads to an objective reality. The relational style of thinking rests heavily on expe­ rience and fails to separate the experiencing person from objective facts, figures, or concepts. Thus students with relational inclinations are said by their instructors to confuse concepts with impressions gained through observation or experience. In their writing and thinking, these students tend to give equal value to personal experience, empirical fact, and concepts derived from persons in authority. They fail to make the distinction between the objective and the subjective, which is required in the analytical academic world. In contrast to the American analytical style, Chinese thinking is strongly relational and for this reason lacks clarity from a Western point of view. The Chinese do not analyze a topic by breaking it into parts. Their thinking is based upon concrete conceptions weighted with judgment (Granet 1950, 8-30). It lacks the power of precise analysis and abstract classification, but it excels in identification by evoking 44 AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS concreteness, emotion, and commitment to action. Chinese though^ strives for unity betvA'een events or objects and their given signs symbols, so that references to the conceptions in the spoken word itself tend to be taken for the act (Granet, 40). An event may be explained bV pointing to another event that occurred at the same time, even though* by Western logic the two are not connected. This movement from even' to event provides the displacement characteristic of Chinese though* which has been called correlational logic (Chang 1952, 215). In coH' trast. Western thought tends to relate things with abstract concepts o* principles. Social influences in relational thinking are particularly important ih gemeinschaft societies. The critical role of social influences is partly explained by the procedures used in learning. Even knowledge which i® based primarily on sensory impressions is social in kind. Knowledge a* well as identity are embedded in social processes. The question that arises is how learning can take place while these social assumptions ar^ supported. The answer for both analytical and relational thinking is that learning requires a model for imitation. Learners match the model with their own production or performance. Learning by use of this model requires a strong and well-defined relationship between the learner and the teacher, who assumes the role of "master." This is the typical pattern of apprenticeship learning in which the learner assumes a deferential and subservient role. Not only are skills and knowledge transferred, but the learner also acquires attitudes of deference to the master, perpetuating the social forms of authority in the society. Imita­ tion is found throughout the world, and it is a dominant form of learning in many societies. It is particularly noticeable in traditional activities such as the martial arts in China and the tea ceremony in Japan. Based on the evidence available, it is clear that styles of thinking vary from culture to culture, sometimes dramatically. The abstract, analytical, pragmatic approach of Americans is very different from the European style emphasizing theory and organic concepts. And as a group, the Western styles vary substantially from the relational style of the Japanese and the Chinese who are more likeJy to think by means of analogy, metaphor, and simile. Much of the difference between East and West in our example can be grasped in language. As we have seen, language is an encoding in symbols of the images, concepts, and patterns of thinking that are all part of the cognitive process. In the next chapter, we shall examine the relation between language and patterns of thinking and behavior in American culture.
Purchase answer to see full attachment