In a post from last year, I touched briefly on some results from my research having to do with a hypothetical scenario. Today we take a deeper dive. The scenario: Suppose a citizen is walking down the street one day when the police arrest him.  They don’t tell him why; they simply arrest him and [...]

Building on the last post about the primacy of money in the Chinese mindset, today we take a look at how this stacks up with a contrasting view from the U.S. This post picks up exactly where the last one left off, just after Carolyn Blackman has described the elaborate, theatrical negotiations she observed in [...]

Elaborating here on the theme from the last book post: the scarcity of money in the Chinese mindset. I ended that last book post by contrasting the default Chinese view with a different, American view of scarcity: the opportunity to use one’s talents in the most fulfilling way possible. In this post we delve more [...]

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are on a mission to make the world a better place. Using their vast fortunes and public visibility, they have launched an effort to get the world’s billionaires to donate more of their wealth to worthy causes. What would happen, some wondered, when they took their effort to China? The [...]

In this book post, the first in a while, we delve into a world quite the opposite of the ethereal “God” world of the last book post — though we return to this world toward the end. A starkly different picture is painted by the Chinese data. This matter-of-fact statement encapsulates the essence of the [...]

So much more to say about the trip, but for now back to the book. In the last “book” post, I introduced “cultural models” in the context of a discussion about whether a hypothetical “Tom” should join a rock band or go to college. Here we’ll look at some actual linguistic data. An excerpt from [...]

Four years ago, while still living in Beijing, I began writing a book about my family’s experiences driving the Mazda around Beijing with California license plates for two and a half years without being pulled over. I have recently taken the project back up. In this blog over the coming months I’ll be posting pieces [...]

Last week I introduced Francis Hsu’s framework and the notion of “Layer 3.” Readers’ comments on that post reminded me of something I read years ago by Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong. Fei, whom we heard from once before, spent academic year 1943-44 in the United States, during the closing phase of World War II. He observed that America [...]

The Chinese flipside of the radical American individualism I addressed yesterday is sometimes called “collectivism.” It’s a broad cover term that’s used in many different ways. Today we’ll take a look at one anthropologist’s view of Chinese and Western notions of group membership. In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and [...]

On an email list I subscribe to, we’ve been discussing stereotypes, and how Americans often conflate “generalization” with “stereotype,” leading to a reluctance to talk about groups at all, for fear of dishonoring individuality. Back when I was designing a research project several years ago, I wanted to look into differing ways Chinese and Americans [...]