Let’s do a little test: imagine a chicken, a cow, and grass. One of these items is redundant. And which one exactly?
Did you exclude the chicken because the cow eats grass and the chicken has nothing to do with it? Or grass, because grass belongs to flora, and cow and chicken to fauna? In the first case, you have an Eastern (holistic) type of thinking: you are interested in the interaction of objects. Eastern thinking does not single out the object from the field and relies on experience, not logic. In the second, Western (analytical): you select an object and then you are interested in its properties.
The hypothesis of two types of thinking arose in the course of comparing two highly developed cultures – Ancient China and Ancient Greece. For the ancient Greeks, daily life was steeped in a sense of choice and the absence of social restrictions, and ordinary people developed a sense of personal influence on events that is unparalleled in any ancient civilization.
The Chinese were the exact opposite of the Greeks. There, the behavior of the individual was determined by the expectations of the group. Chinese society made a person very strongly feel like a part of a huge, complex and generally benevolent organism and prescribed to strive, first of all, for intra-group harmony.
In the West, they directly declare disagreement with the interlocutor, but, after arguing, they can safely go to dinner together.
We recently decided to compare modern people who grew up in societies influenced by ancient Chinese thought and influenced by ancient Greek tradition. It turned out that the differences between Ancient Greece and China are reproduced among modern people! Here is one of the experiments that confirms this.
Participants were shown a virtual aquarium on a monitor and recorded eye movement while looking at the image. The Americans singled out the largest object: “Three large fish with pink fins are swimming to the left.” The Japanese noted the green color of the water, described the stones and shells at the bottom, and, among other things, swimming fish. For them, the environment was no less important than the central object.
These differences in perception are also reflected in social preferences. Asians tend to be collectivist, Americans tend to be individualistic. In the event of contradictions in the East, most likely, they will come to the conclusion that both are true: to openly express disagreement means making an enemy. In the West, they do not hesitate to declare their disagreement with the interlocutor, but, having argued, they can calmly go to dinner together.
When communicating with babies, American mothers draw their attention to various objects, while Chinese mothers draw their attention to their immediate environment. Special studies on the material of Russia were not carried out. But what little data we have shows that Russia is closer to Asia. Is it so? Let’s go back to the cow, the grass and the chicken. How did you answer this question?