My favorite cultural research result of all time comes from psychology. The study was conducted by Li-Jun Ji, Kaiping Peng and Richard E. Nisbett (Culture, Control and Perception of Relationships in the Environment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, vol. 78, No. 5, 943-955). For anyone who might have thought that culture is some [...]

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 [...]

Today we’re revisiting the topic of contracts versus hétong. There’s rich territory to explore here. I was recently revisiting Lin Yutang’s classic book, My Country and My People, and it spurred some more thinking on this issue. I’ve quoted from the book before: it was Lin Yutang who referred to China as “a nation of individualists” [...]

Dreams are, as I claimed near the end of last Friday’s post, alive and well in China. If we needed any more evidence that dreams hold appeal in China as they do in the U.S., we’ve got some. First, this piece from Time, about lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who was arrested under false-seeming pretenses, and has [...]

To Americans, our life dreams are no less than a spiritual matter. Because they represent the highest aspirations of a sacred human life, dreams themselves are sacred.

A few more research findings, to shed light on some other aspects of Chinese and American culture. One question asked of participants: Tom is about to graduate from high school.  He decides he doesn’t want to go to college, despite his parents’ wishes.  Instead, he wants to join a rock band.  What will the family [...]

Yesterday and the day before we took a look at Chinese and American responses to scenarios about a fallen tree and a hypothetical rich person. Besides the lessons about the differences between abstract American moralism versus concrete Chinese practicality, there is, once again, also a lesson for us about oversimplifying.

First, yesterday I came across this article — a thoughtful discussion of some Chinese reactions to the Tonghua tragedy discussed last week in this blog. There is much worth commenting on, but I’m shirking the temptation in order to probe a little more deeply into a topic we began looking at yesterday: American moralism and [...]

In two posts last week (Wednesday and Thursday) I touched on an American breed of moralism and discussed some of its implications. Today we start to bring out some key differences between this view and a predominant Chinese view.

Yesterday I wrote about how each of us is “several selves,” and that this inner plurality gives us a wealth of options to choose from in relating to cultures that might otherwise seem unfamiliar. In some research I did I looked at how Chinese and American participants reasoned through certain scenarios. I discovered a number of [...]