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Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. The researchers led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett tracked the eye movements of the students -- 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese -- to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area. "They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who thinks the differences are cultural. "Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop. They can't afford it." In Chinese culture, harmony is crucial, Nisbett said, while in the West, the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others. And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago. In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated. Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece, where more people ran individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen. Differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said. In the test, the Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner -- a leopard in the jungle for example -- and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said. He said when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes. Source: www.kentucky.com Aug 23, 05 |
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