The most vivid description I have ever heard of the Chinese “external locus of control” came from a student of mine my first year in China. It was spring of 1992, and she was talking about her older sister in Harbin, down the line from Qiqihar, where I was teaching English. Whenever she talked about her sister, it was always about how different they were from each other. When she described her sister, she used a Chinese expression I hadn’t heard before. She said her sister’s “edge had been worn down” (棱角被磨平了). I didn’t understand and asked her to explain. She said that when people are young they have an edge, like a cube of wood. Over time, society wears down the edge into a flat surface. It was only a matter of time, she said, until everyone’s edge gets worn down. She was wondering when hers and mine would get worn down.

My 23-year-old response was a mixture of shock and pity. The response of my current self, with many more years of experience and professional training under my belt, is a nod of recognition.

If we dig deeper into what’s going on in the responses by both the Americans and the Chinese to the Surprise Arrest, Tax Hike, and Draft scenarios, what starts to emerge are two starkly differing models of the relationship between human beings and the world around us.

For the Americans, there is a deep-seated expectation that our desires do and should shape the world at large. When there is something in the world that is out of alignment with our desires, we expect that, all things being equal, we should be able to change the world, as opposed to being shaped by the world. This belief shines through in the Americans’ responses to all three scenarios:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with his desires: sue the officer and bring some justice.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the citizenry. It is incumbent upon the citizens to take action in order to bring the world into alignment with their desires: demonstrate, refuse to pay, rebel.

Draft: Chris’s desire not to fight, born of his pacifist religious beliefs, threatens to be overwhelmed by the hard fact of the draft. Even the hardness of this fact, though, might not stop Chris from avoiding fighting. At the very least, it is reasonable to expect that Chris won’t be a great soldier, because if he doesn’t want to do something 100%, he won’t do it well: lack of desire leads to lack of worldly effect.

On the Chinese side, this expectation is by no means missing; it’s just much more muted. We saw in the Chinese responses to Surprise Arrest that, at least under this one set of circumstances, there is a strong expectation that humans can change the world around them, here by suing the police officer and demanding some form of “justice.” Still, as we’ve seen, this expectation is due to the particulars of the situation, not due to any overarching belief that humans can shape their worlds. From the Chinese side, the scenarios could be summarized as:

Surprise Arrest: The situation created by the police officer is in direct and extreme conflict with the desires of the arrestee, and also poses a major inconvenience to the arrestee. It is incumbent upon the arrestee to take action in order to protect himself and his reputation.

Tax Hike: The situation created by the government is probably in conflict with the desires and material well-being of greater society, but there really isn’t anything to be done about it: the government is too big and vague to fight, the harm isn’t immediate or apparent, and it isn’t even clear who the victims are.

Draft: It’s a time of war. The nation must be protected. It doesn’t matter what a person’s own beliefs or desires might be. Everyone must do his duty to the country.

I will never know what it is like to be Chinese, to be like my student back in Qiqihar, or like her sister, waiting for my “edge” to be “worn down.” I only know “reality” from my particular, highly American perspective. Still, I can’t help but think that the differences I have described in this and other posts on locus of control reflect a fundamental difference in the moment-to-moment reality of Chinese and American people. It’s actually not much of a stretch to posit this. We know from psychology that people are, in real time, perceiving and responding to and interacting with their environments, and strategizing how to do so most effectively in order to achieve their goals. The world must feel inherently different if it is something rule-governed that is there for my shaping, as opposed to being more or less chaotic, whose caprice I am eternally at the mercy of.

One way in which cultures differ from one another is in what Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden–Turner call “locus of control” — in essence: Who makes things happen, me or the universe? I’ve discussed this in a previous post: “internally directed” cultures see individual will as the main factor, while “externally directed” cultures see circumstances as the main factor.

This difference shows up throughout Chinese and American responses to the “draft” question I wrote about in the last post, repeated here:

The government decides to go to war. Chris is drafted into the army to fight, but he feels strongly that war is wrong. What will Chris say and do? What should he do?

I have dubbed the cultural model that embodies Americans’ internally-directed nature “You Can’t Change Me”: People are who they are, and they will do what interests them. Especially young people. Trying to force people to do things they don’t want to do will have the opposite result.

With regard to Chris, our draftee, here is what some of the Americans have to say:

E-13 What would Chris say and do?  Okay I agree with you. He’ll probably try to get out of it, he’ll probably say, oh, I have to go finish my college degree. But I think if the government is insistent that he go to war, that he would do it.  But then he wouldn’t go a hundered percent.

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E-21 Chris can still say something like, I can be governed by the government, I’m certainly not going to go against this war.  But personally I’m against this war, and I feel war is wrong.  And in that case I wouldn’t be a good addition to the army anyway.

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E-25 Well I think to a certain extent you can’t really make people fight if they don’t want to.

The last sentence by E-25 sums it all up perfectly: “You can’t really make people fight if they don’t want to.” Taking the American position to an extreme, we could say, “You can’t make people do anything if they don’t want to.”

Per usual, this model, You Can’t Change Me, is perfectly comprehensible in both cultural worlds. It’s just given much higher priority by the Americans. The one time it shows up in the Chinese responses it is instantly rebutted:

C-14 He definitely won’t be a good soldier.

C-15 No, no, no.

C-14 At the same time he’s killing people he’ll be thinking that war is wrong.

C-15 This question is too difficult for you.  It’s not that I can necessarily give a good answer, because…I don’t know how to answer this.

C-14 This is hard, this…what should he do?

C-15 That depends on what you put first.  There’s an order to the things he’s facing.  Traditionally in China the country comes first, but I believe it’s also this way in America, so it’s really simple.  He will go fight, and he will be a very good soldier in the war.

That’s all there is to it: there may be some conflict there, but Duty to Country wins, hands down.

In the next post we’ll take a look at how this internal versus external locus of control orientation fits into the two very different Chinese and American cultural model systems governing relationships between people and their environments.

Having just argued that we should be skeptical about characterizing China as collectivist and the U.S. as individualist, I will now do a complete about-face and give a striking example of just how collectivist thinking can be in China, and just how individualist Americans can be. The goal, still, is to shed light on a number of complexities in how the American and Chinese mindsets overlap and differ.

One of the interview questions asked:

The government decides to go to war.  Chris is drafted into the army to fight, but he feels strongly that war is wrong.  What will Chris say and do?  What should he do?

Here, the answers I got were exactly what my stereotypes told me to expect: “blind obedience” from the Chinese and “rugged individualism” from the Americans. Some sample from the Chinese responses about what Chris’s alter ego, Zhang San, would think and do (using my coding system, with “C” for Chinese and “E” for English):

C-13 He can only go.  Because being a soldier he can only…it doesn’t matter what his individual will is, he must go, right?

C-12 Right.

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C-21 Following orders is a sworn duty.  Because, after all, he’s been drafted.  Now we common people aren’t soldiers, we can oppose war and such, but a soldier, maybe in his heart he thinks it’s wrong but there’s nothing he can do.

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C-14 “In this sort of situation what would Zhang San do?”  Well I think even though he thinks it’s wrong, if the government tells him to join the army it’s not okay for him not to.  So he still must go fight.  “What should he do?”  I think this person is in a tough position as to what he should do, because under conditions of war it seems that individual ideas, individuals’ voices manifest very weakly.

C-15 Right.

C-14 He definitely still must go fight, but what should he do?

C-15 I don’t know.

C-14 I think his only option is that he still must go fight, but he would tell his opinions to his close friends or to the news media.  But this sort of person might become a traitor, so that’s not okay either.

C-15 He won’t become a traitor.

This is not the only viewpoint expressed by the Chinese interviewees, but it is by far the dominant one. Yes, Zhang San may have a contrary view, but it doesn’t matter one bit. “Individual will” be damned: the enemy is at the doorstep and the nation has called. Collective will wins the day.

The American picture is radically different. It’s not that they come down firmly on Chris’s side. Rather, whereas individual will is clearly subservient in the Chinese responses, with the Americans there is a far more equal tension between individual and collective will. As such, the Americans are deeply conflicted. A sampling:

E-17 And so I think about that in terms of what it means to be patriotic, like how far will I take that, am I just all talk, or would I get out on the field and support that?  And I’d like to think that I would.  But there’s so much I want to do in my life.  And war just seems like such a bad table to go to in Las Vegas, you know, it’s just a bad deal, it’s like the odds are not good, the benefits are not worth it. When it’s a question of life or death, and compared with having the rest of my life, following through on what I say, I don’t think I’d do it.

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E-20 I really don’t know, it’s kind of a difficult question.  From my point of view, being the sacreligious type person I am…uh, no.  ’Cause that’s not fair to everybody else.  I mean, nobody wants to go to war, and nobody wants to get killed in the line of fire.

E-21 I think Chris can still follow what the government does, and yet be individually opposed to the government, in that he can…not go to war.  Or, go into the army.  I think he has that right, although the government, if every person did this, wouldn’t be able to wage war.

The self-doubt expresses itself in many ways in these and in several other examples. At no point does any of the Americans come down firmly on one side or the other.

The draft scenario is meant to be an extreme, limiting case in the battle between individual will and collective duty. It is hard to imagine a scenario that diminishes the importance of individual will more than this scenario does. Yet, even here, the Americans go to bat for Chris. To me this shows how extreme American individualism can be.

Before the China Law Blog posts, I had promised to flesh out the ingroup/outgroup picture I sketched in the first In Crowd post. In that post I questioned the standard descriptions of the U.S. as “individualist” and the Chinese as “collectivist,” pointing toward the distinction between ingroup and outgroup as one possible way to clarify how individuals and groups relate to each other in the U.S. and China. I’ll pick up by repeating the last two paragraphs of that post and continuing from there.

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One of the key differences between Chinese and U.S. culture is where ingroup boundaries get drawn in society as a whole. The rule of thumb is that Chinese culture involves narrower group boundaries: ingroups are very small, perhaps consisting only of a person and her immediate family. Everyone else is an outgroup member, and is generally treated with a degree of suspicion.

In the U.S., in contrast, people are more willing to consider a broader range of others as potential ingroupers — hence Americans’ famous (and, viewed from some perspectives, cloying, and even insincere) friendliness toward strangers.

One way to represent this would be:

To massively oversimplify: ingroup boundaries in China don’t venture much past circle #2, while American ingroup boundaries might extend all the way out to #5. It’s oversimplified for many reasons. First, the People’s Republic of China as a whole is certainly an ingroup in the context of the world — hence patriotism. Same with the U.S. Second, ingroups can and do crosscut geography: religious, ethnic, and racial groups, for instance. There is just no simple way to accurately depict all the complexities of ingroups and outgroups.

Caveats aside, there really is something to this. And if this is true, then we could make the case that Americans, with their more inclusive group sense, are the true communitarians, while the Chinese are the true individualists.

Lin Yutang, one of the most famous interpreters of China to the West, wrote of this in his most famous book, My Country and My People. He wrote it in 1935, before the full occupation of China by the Japanese, before the rest of World War II, before the Communist revolution and Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping and Tian’anmen and Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. He wrote the book in English, after having lived in the U.S. for several years. Nobody before or since has written with such clarity and wit about fundamental aspects of Chinese society.

He kicks off Chapter Six, “Social and Political Life,” like this:

The Chinese are a nation of individualists. They are family-minded, not social-minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. It is curious that the word “society” does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought.…

“Public spirit” is a new term, so is “civic consciousness,” and so is “social service.” There are no such commodities in China. To be sure, there are “social affairs,” such as weddings, funerals, and birthday celebrations and Buddhistic processions and annual festivals. But the things which make up English and American social life, viz. sport, politics and religion, are conspicuously absent.…They play games, to be sure, but these games are characteristic of Chinese individualism.…Teamwork is unknown. In Chinese card games, each man plays for himself. (Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000 [orig. 1935], p. 169.)

Of course this is one man’s opinion. All grain-of-salt warnings remain in force. At the same time, this was a particularly insightful person.

And he is not alone. Observers East and West, as well as a great many social scientists (chiefly psychologists, but also anthropologists and linguists), have provided further evidence for an enduring Chinese mindset roughly along the lines sketched out here by Lin, and echoed in my research.

So, if “the Chinese are a nation of individualists,” what are we to make of the famous distinction between U.S.-as-individualist and China-as-communitarian? Clearly the distinction does not work if it is interpreted too literally or too strictly. Instead, a more nuanced view of what constitutes “groups” in a society will allow us to keep what works about the distinction, without forcing us into inaccurate conclusions.

After seeing the volume and nature of the responses my three guest posts generated, Dan Harris, gracious host of the China Law Blog, invited me to respond. You can read the responses here, or below.

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Audiences are often polarized by the claims I make about differences between Chinese and Western mindsets. It’s been no different here, in the comments left on my three guest posts. Most everyone falls into one of two camps: “This is great,” or “This is bunk.” The “bunk” camp has roughly four critiques, which I’ll address here.

Critique #1: (a) This abstract mindset stuff can’t possibly account for the dirty details of everyday business — (b) which makes it useless.

On (1a), absolutely. Mindset is one piece of a huge set of puzzles and challenges that have to be addressed in running a successful business anywhere in the world. Three brief blog posts are simply by necessity going to be somewhat abstract and vague. (And woe to the company that hires a consultant to write blog posts and do nothing else!) Any serious consulting engagement has to go way beyond mindset and into the organizational and operational nitty-gritty that real businesspeople face every day.

As for (1b), for the best chance at success you need both the abstract and the specific. To the extent that the day-to-day work of running a company can be informed by high-level principles like mindset, it is likely to be more effective. Unless one thinks the findings themselves are inaccurate, which is a separate conversation.

Critique #2: (a) Current political and social circumstances can explain all the relevant mindset differences. (b) Societies change over time (a form of evidence for (2a)).

I can’t do justice here to the volumes of statistically validated social science research that demonstrate the surprising stability of mindsets over time. For cultural issues generally, I’ll refer you to the work of Geert Hofstede and his team. For U.S. and China, pick up any of the 19th-Century works by U.S. missionaries in China (my favorite is Smith’s Chinese Characteristics. Or, better yet, read Lin Yutang’s 1935 classic My Country and My People, and see how well it’s held up over time.

Critique #3: Stereotypes may have some business use.

There’s a terminological distinction in the field of intercultural communication between stereotyping and generalizing. Generalizing is the act of making statements about a group of people, realizing that there is variation within any population. Stereotyping is taking a perceived characteristic of an individual and claiming, on the basis of this, that all people “like this person” share this characteristic (and probably other negative characteristics too). I simply don’t see the business value in this latter act. Generalizing, yes; stereotyping, no.

Critique #4: Don’t be too easy on the Chinese: they could in fact be out to mess you up.

True. No businessperson should act without a duly critical stance toward people with possibly competing interests. What I find disheartening is the certainty with which Westerners often attribute certain behaviors to this or that “Chinese characteristic,” which then often leads to broader, more negative generalizations, and ultimately to an unproductive, and ill-deserved, distrust.

There is no one best window through which to view the Chinese, or anyone. But the more possible windows we allow ourselves, the richer our set of cognitive tools for solving complex problems — intercultural and other.

Here is the last of my three guest blog posts on the China Law Blog. Again, I recommend scrolling down to see the comments if you read it on the China Law Blog site.

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Human beings stereotype. It’s part of our wiring. There’s no getting around it.

In China you will be dealing with your own stereotypes of Chinese people. You could either pretend they’re not there and have them sink your business, or you can acknowledge them and re-frame them into more positive ways of thinking. It’s up to you.

Here are 9 common stereotypes you’re likely to have in whole or in part, and ways to re-frame them:

1. The Chinese are out to cheat me.

China has been through a lot of tough history, over thousands of years and even up to very recent times. Chinese people have had to make tough choices in a world of scarcity. This mentality has been passed down through the generations. No Chinese does anything a Westerner wouldn’t do if fighting for survival.

The upshot: Cross your T’s and dot your I’s. Be prudent, not paranoid.

2. The Chinese think they’re superior.

The Chinese are legitimately proud of their amazing cultural accomplishments. Think of the food, the monuments, the language, and on and on. Chinese give respect where it’s due: to Westerners for their advanced technology and social institutions, and to themselves for what they’ve done.

The upshot: Allow yourself to admire what there is to admire, while keeping your cool.

3. The Chinese lie.

People from every culture lie. What Westerners call “lying” in China is often just a more subtle form of communication than we’re used to. China is what’s known as a “high context” culture: information is assumed to be in the background — the context. The more you learn about the assumed context, the better you’ll get at seeing the meaning behind the words.

The upshot: Get trained on Chinese communication style. Learn as much as you can about the Chinese mindset, so that you know what background assumptions people bring to the conversation.

4. The Chinese go back on their word.

Shaped for millennia by a fickle, resource-poor environment rife with natural disasters, the Chinese see the world as constantly in flux. Circumstances change, and it’s foolish to set a plan in stone now for an imagined future, when it might not be a fit for the actual future. It’s best to remain adaptable and flexible.

The upshot: Be ready for your counterparts to ask for changes to contracts. Understand that in China the contract is often seen as the beginning of a relationship, not a fixed definition of reality.

5. The Chinese are always stalling for time.

Like any business counterpart anywhere in the world, the Chinese have strategies for getting what they want. A common one is to use home court to their advantage. It’s easier on the Chinese if things take longer than it is on you.

Upshot: Be ready and set reasonable expectations that things probably aren’t going to happen quickly.

6. The Chinese are stingy.

The Chinese are thrifty. Again, over millennia the Chinese have often had to scrape together meager livings out of a hostile, overcrowded environment. Every resource is precious, and could disappear at a moment’s notice if not carefully guarded.

The upshot: Negotiation is not viewed as a win–win proposition. Be thrifty with your resources too, and meet the Chinese on their own zero-sum terms.

7. The Chinese don’t care about quality.

Everyone cares about quality. But when it comes to priorities, sometimes it’s more important to the Chinese to save some resources than to make something that fits Westerners’ high standards. See above about precious resources.

The upshot: Be fastidious and unrelenting in your QC. Get feet on the street and keep them there.

8. The Chinese don’t care about their environment.

The world of the average Chinese person is relatively small. People are focused — narrowly, from a prosperous Western perspective — on day-to-day concerns like having enough to eat and a roof over their heads. It might be nice to have a cleaner environment, but for many Chinese that’s a luxury.

The upshot: Instead of complaining about the awful air, imagine what it would be like if you didn’t get to leave it in a week or two.

9. The Chinese hate Westerners.

In fact Westerners are much admired in China. What Westerners perceive as “hatred” is usually more a vague sense of suspicion. Like everything else, this results from the thought habits of the past, especially the past century and a half, which saw Westerners exploit and mistreat China. All this means is that you have to earn their trust.

The upshot: Behave in a way that is worthy of trust, and trust will come. With time.

Categories can be useful. Reasoned, informed judgment can be useful. Stereotypes have zero business value. Get savvy about your own stereotypes and re-frame them. Not only will you feel better and get along better, but your business will do better.

Here is the second of my three China Law Blog guest posts. If you read it on the China Law Blog site, I recommend scrolling down to the comments section — there seem to be some strong opinions about my claims.

Here’s the post:

Today, esteemed colleague and China Law guru Dan Harris posted the first of three guest posts by me on his multiple-award-winning China Law Blog. Please check it out, as he gives a nice introduction.

For archival purposes, I’m putting the post here as well.

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Besides universalism versus particularism, discussed in the last post, another angle from which to view the differences between the American and Chinese responses is “rule-based” versus “relationship-based” cultures. In the U.S., rules rule: as we have seen in the pedestrian scenario and in the discussion of the interview scenarios, Americans are much more likely than Chinese to reason in terms of rules. The Chinese approach, in contrast, is to privilege relationships: the relationships between the hypothetical driver who hit the pedestrian and his passenger, or the relationships and interactions between the offending police officer and the innocent civilian.

One surprising logical consequence of these differences is that the classic distinction between “individualism” and “collectivism” gets called into question. This distinction is often listed first in discussions of how China and the U.S. differ. It is usually described something like this:

In the U.S., the main unit of society is the individual. Groups matter less. People are judged more on individual accomplishments and failures than on group accomplishments and failures.

In China, the group is king. Individuals are not free to choose their own actions if these actions interfere with the goals of the group. Individual accomplishments are deliberately muted, as are individual failures, at least in public.

These statements are more or less accurate. The problem is that they are often extended into a more general statement that “groups matter more” in China than they do in the U.S. Which is also true to some extent, except that a lot hinges on what is meant by “the group.”

Vast swaths of the scholarly literature in sociology and social psychology are devoted to the study of how human beings form social groups. One key distinction of the field is “ingroup” versus “outgroup.” An ingroup is a group to which members feel loyalty due to a sense of shared identity, such as an ethnic, racial or religious group. Outgroups are members of groups other than the ingroup. A classic example from American high school life would be the “jocks”: a group of people who share an identity as athletes, and a particularly high social standing. For any given jock, the other jocks are members of his ingroup; for non-jocks, the jocks are in an outgroup. Various other ingroup/outgroup divides characterize much of U.S. high school life: band members, “dirtheads”, nerds, and so on.

Within an ingroup, the shared sense of identity creates a sense of shared group interests. This, in turn, generates trust. If one of the ingroup members feels threatened by someone from an outgroup, it is the job of other ingroup members to protect the threatened member.

There is no single “ingroup,” of course, as people travel in many social circles, and degree of closeness can vary significantly. Relative to a group of classmates, one’s family could be an ingroup; relative to the school population as a whole, one’s classmates could be an ingroup. Concentric circles are often used to represent this aspect of ingroup–outgroup relations.

One of the key differences between Chinese and U.S. culture is where ingroup boundaries get drawn in society as a whole. The rule of thumb is that Chinese culture involves narrower group boundaries: ingroups are very small, perhaps consisting only of a person and her immediate family. Everyone else is an outgroup member, and is generally treated with a degree of suspicion.

In the U.S., in contrast, people are more willing to consider a broader range of others as potential ingroupers — hence Americans’ famous (and, viewed from some perspectives, cloying, and even insincere) friendliness toward strangers.

More on this in the next post.

In the last two posts I’ve summarized similarities and differences between how Chinese and American interviewees responded to scenarios about a surprise arrest and a tax hike. I ended the last post with this:

I got exactly what I had expected from the Americans: anger in response to both the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike questions. In the Chinese population, why was the response to Tax Hike so different from the response to Surprise Arrest?

The question shows my American bias. A simple Chinese answer to the question might be: These two questions are completely different. Why would you even expect that there would be similar responses to the two questions?

Here’s why: because in both questions a wrong is perpetrated by someone in power over someone out of power. And because right is right and wrong is wrong, I would be equally angry about both scenarios. And because I would be equally angry, everybody else should be too.

This string of statements has logical and factual flaws and weaknesses that I didn’t see at the time I was beginning my research. What I didn’t think of at the time:

1. What is considered a “wrong” varies a great deal by culture.
2. What is meant by “someone in power” and “someone out of power” can be construed in many different ways.
3. “Right is right and wrong is wrong” is a highly contestable statement.
4. My own angry feelings would be a poor predictor of how other people would feel, even without culture to complicate matters.

#s 1, 2 and 3 turned out to explain the differences between the Chinese and American responses fairly completely. #4 is generally true, but in this case my intuition that “other people” would be angry was not completely false, given how angrily the Americans responded to both scenarios.

Regarding #s 1-3, I am not going to descend into a post-modern spiral of moral relativism here. That said, I do want to put “right” and “wrong” into a cross-cultural context.

In earlier posts I have at times written about universalism and particularism. Universalist cultures tend to believe in timeless truths holding of all situations; particularist cultures are more likely to take into account the specifics of individual situations. This difference can account for most of the puzzling similarities and differences in the Chinese and U.S. responses to the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike scenarios.

Fundamentally what is at play here are two starkly divergent default ways of viewing the world. From a typical Chinese perspective, life presents itself as a series of problems to be solved. Ideals may exist, but they are secondary to whatever is the most immediate need. I think of it as a kind of triage: life throws so much at us that we can’t possibly address everything, so let’s figure out what’s really at stake, and put our energies where they are best used. This requires a mastery of detail: if I don’t understand exactly how situations differ, how can I possibly decide which of them are worthy of my time and effort?

In short, life is a series of particular events with particular actors whose actions cause particular consequences for particular people. I can’t be asked to evaluate a scenario unless I know the…particulars.

For Americans, the calculus is different. Americans tend to be more interested in abstractions, and are more willing to engage in abstract discussions, because Americans are fundamentally interested in what is universal, on what unites across difference. The reasons for this are often debated, and range from hard-core “materialist” approaches that view America’s physical environment, especially its abundant land and other resources, as the fundamental determinant, to more nuanced approaches that factor in what the American mindset inherited from European antecedents. (It turns out, for instance, that the Swiss are even more universalist than the Americans.)

Regardless, those who subscribe to the universalist world view will approach the scenarios in a radically different way from how the Chinese do. Instead of richly specific scenarios, Americans see roles, such as perpetrator and victim. Who actually instantiates the roles is of secondary importance; what matters more is that a wrong was committed, and when a wrong is committed, there must be some form of redress.

So let’s pan out and look at Surprise Arrest and Tax hike through these two different lenses. An American will likely see the scenarios as follows:

• Surprise Arrest describes a powerful perpetrator committing a wrong against a powerless victim. The power asymmetry combines with the actual harm to the victim to generate anger, along with calls for strong counter-action.
• Tax Hike describes a powerful perpetrator committing a wrong against a powerless victim. The power asymmetry combines with the actual harm to the victim to generate anger, along with calls for strong counter-action.

When seen through the role-based universalist lens, it’s no surprise that the two scenarios seem essentially identical.

From a Chinese perspective, the scenarios look like this:

• Surprise Arrest describes a specific individual (policeman) committing specific, immediate and tangible harm (physical restraint, deprivation of information) to someone (the arrestee) who has done nothing to deserve this treatment, and whose life is immediately affected in specific ways. Redress by the victim toward the policeman is a logical consequence.
• Tax Hike describes an amorphous and distant group of people (“the government”) taking a somewhat abstract action (passing a law) which will probably harm an amorphous and mostly distant group of people (“society”). The action might harm me or someone I know at some later stage, but it’s not at all clear how severe the harm will be. And besides, no immediate, or even long-term, actions present themselves for the taking: how can “society” punish “the government”?

It’s not that the government’s actions aren’t wrong. The Chinese participants made it clear that they thought it was wrong. Viewed, however, through the particularist lens and its triage approach, Surprise Arrest is bound to draw a lot more ire than Tax Hike. There is potentially much more bang for one’s precious problem-solving buck in redressing the Surprise Arrest scenario than in redressing the Tax Hike scenario.

So, the universalism/particularism split solves the biggest piece of the mystery. But it’s not the whole story.