Psychologists have discovered the surprising influence of geography on the way we think, behave and see ourselves.
When Horace Capron first explored Hokkaido in 1871, he looked for signs of human life in the vast grasslands, open forests and menacing black mountains. “Death silence reigns in this extraordinary place,” he later wrote. “No rustling of leaves, no chirping of birds or the sound of living things.” According to him, it is an eternal place, emerging directly from prehistoric times.
“How wonderful to know that this incredibly rich and beautiful country, belonging to one of the oldest and most populous peoples in the world… remains as uninhabited and unknown as the African desert”, he added.
It was the Japanese border – their version of the ‘Wild West’ in America. The northernmost island of Japan agenqq365, Hokkaido is a remote place separated from Honshu by a sea full of waves. Travelers who dare to cross must endure brutal winters, rugged volcanic landscapes and savage wilderness. So the Japanese government ceded most of the island to the indigenous Ainu, who lived by hunting and fishing.
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All that changed in the mid-19th century. Fearing an invasion by Russia, the Japanese government decided to reclaim the northern part of the country, recruiting former Samurai members to settle in Hokkaido. Soon others followed, with farms, ports, roads and railroads popping up across the island. Soil experts (agriculturists) like Capron were hired to advise on how best to cultivate farmland, and within 70 years the population grew from a few thousand to more than two million. At the start of the millennium, the number reached nearly six million.
Few people living in Hokkaido today have ever conquered the wilderness. But psychologists have found that an adventurous spirit still influences the way they think, feel and reason, compared to people living in Honshu, which is only 54km away. They are more individualistic, proud of success, more ambitious about personal development, and less connected to those around them. In fact, when comparing countries, this ‘cognitive profile’ is closer to Americans than to other Japanese residents.
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The story of Hokkaido is just one of a growing number of case studies investigating how our social environment shapes our minds. From the vast differences between East and West, to the less glaring differences between states in the US, it’s becoming increasingly clear that history, geography and culture can change how we all think in subtle and surprising ways—down to our individual perceptions. Our way of thinking can be shaped by the types of plants our ancestors used to grow, and a river can mark the boundary between two different cognitive styles.
Wherever we live, a greater awareness of these influences can help us understand our thoughts a little better.
‘Weird’ thoughts
Until recently, researchers ignored the global diversity of ways of thinking. In 2010, a highly influential article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences reported that the majority of psychology subjects have been “western, educated, industrial-oriented, rich and democratic” (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) or ‘Weird for short’. .’ Nearly 70% are Americans, and most are college students hoping to earn extra pocket money or college credit by giving their time to take part in these psychological experiments.
The underlying assumption has been that this collection of people can represent a universal truth about human nature – that all people are basically the same. If that were true, Western bias might not matter. However, the small number of studies conducted examining people from different cultures suggests otherwise. “Westerners – and Americans in particular – appear at the end of the statistical distribution,” said Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the study.
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Some of the most striking differences revolve around the concepts of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’; whether you consider yourself independent and self-sufficient, or linked and connected with others around you, value groups over individuals. In general – there are many exceptions – people in the West tend to be more individualistic and people from Asian countries like India, Japan or China tend to be more collective.
In most cases, the consequences are as far as you can imagine. When asked about their behavior and attitudes, people in the West, who are more individualistic, tend to value personal success over group achievement, which in turn is also associated with a greater need for self-esteem and the pursuit of personal happiness. But this need for self-validation also creates overconfidence, with many experiments showing that ‘Weird’ participants tend to overestimate their abilities. When asked about their competence, for example, 94% of American professors claim they are ‘better than average’.
This trend of self-inflation appears almost completely absent in a series of studies across East Asia; in fact, in some cases participants tended to underestimate their abilities relative to their self-worth inflation. People who live in individualistic environments may also place greater emphasis on personal choice and freedom.
Crucially, our ‘social orientation’ seems to refer more to a fundamental aspect of thinking. People in more collective environments tend to be more ‘holistic’ in the way they think about problems, focus more on relationships and the context of the current situation, while people in more individualistic environments tend to focus on discrete elements, and consider situations as fixed and unchanging.
As a simple example, imagine that you see a photo of a tall person intimidating someone who is shorter. Without additional information, a Westerner would be more inclined to think that this behavior reflected something more important and still a great person: he might be a bad person. “Whereas if you think holistically, you’ll think there’s something else going on between the two: maybe the bigger person is the leader or the father of the other,” explains Henrich.
And this way of thinking also extends to the way we classify inanimate objects. Suppose you are asked to name two related objects in a list of words such as “train, bus, line”. What did you mention? This is known as the “triad test”, and people in the West may choose ‘bus’ and ‘train’ because they are both types of vehicle. A holistic thinker, on the other hand, may prefer the ‘train’ and the ‘path’ because they focus more on the functional relationship between the two – one important for the job function of the other.
It can even change how you view things. A study tracking eye movement by Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan found that participants from East Asia tended to spend more time looking for the background of an image – figuring out the context – whereas people in America tended to spend more time concentrating on the main focus of the image. the. Interestingly, this difference can also be seen in the drawings of children from Japan and Canada, implying that different ways of seeing appear at a very young age. And by directing our attention, narrow or scattered focus directly determines what we remember of one scene at a time.
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“If we are what we see, and we focus on different things, then we live in a different world,” Henrich said. While some claim that our social orientation may have a genetic element, evidence to date suggests that it was learned from others.
Alex Mesoudi of the University of Exeter recently profiled the thinking of Bangladeshi-British families in East London. He found that within a generation, the children of immigrants began to adopt some elements that were more individualistic and less holistic. Media use, in particular, tends to be the biggest marker of such change. “Tends to be more important than clusters in explaining the shift.”
But why do differences in thinking arise? The obvious explanation is that they reflect existing philosophies that have emerged in each area over time. Nisbett argues that Western philosophers emphasize freedom and independence, while Eastern traditions such as Taoism tend to focus on the concept of unity. Confucius, for example, emphasized “duties between emperor and citizens, parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister, and between friends.”
This different way of seeing the world is embedded in literature, education and political institutions, so it is perhaps not surprising that these ideas have been internalized, influencing some of the most basic psychological processes.
However, the subtle differences between individual countries suggest that many other surprising factors are at play.
On the front line
Let’s say the US, the most individualist country among other Western countries. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have long argued that expansion and exploration into the West has led to a more independent soul, as each pioneer fought the wild and the other for survival. In line with this theory, recent psychological studies have shown that states at the edge of the border (such as Montana) tend to score higher on measures of individualism. To confirm the ‘voluntary resettlement theory’, however, psychologists wanted to test a second, independent case study as a counter argument.
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It is for this reason that Hokkaido proves to be very attractive. Like most East Asian countries, Japan as a whole tends to have a more collective and holistic mindset. But the rapid migration to northern territories resembled the invasion of settlements as in America’s ‘Wild West’; Emperor Meiji’s government even employed US agriculturists, such as Horace Capron, to help cultivate the land. If the voluntary resettlement theory is correct, the pioneers should have a more independent outlook on Hokkaido than elsewhere in the country.
Of course, Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan has found that people in Hokkaido tend to value more independence and personal accomplishment – and emotions such as pride – than Japanese people from other islands, and they care less about what other people think. The participants were also asked to take a social reasoning test, which asked them to discuss a baseball player taking performance-enhancing drugs.
While Japanese from other islands tend to explore context – such as pressures for success – Japanese from Hokkaido tend to blame the baseball player’s personality or weaknesses in his moral character. Again, the tendency to blame personal attributes is a characteristic of individualist societies, and is closer to the response of the average American.
germ theory
Another (inverting) idea is that contrasting mindsets are a growing response to germs. In 2008, Corey Fincher (now at the University of Warwick) and his colleagues analyzed global epidemiological data to show a region’s individualism and collectivism scores correlate with disease prevalence: the more likely you are to be infected, the more collective you are, and the less individualistic you are.
The rough idea is that collectivism, characterized by greater conformity and respect for others, can make people more careful to avoid behavior that spreads disease. It’s hard to prove that real-world correlations aren’t caused by other factors, such as the wealth of a country, but laboratory experiments offer support for the idea – when psychologists bait people into fearing illness, they seem to adopt a more collective way of thinking. , such as greater conformity to group behavior.
But perhaps the most surprising theory comes from the fields. Thomas Talhelm of the University of Chicago recently examined 28 different provinces in China, and found that thinking orientation reflected the local agriculture of the area.
Talhelm said he was first inspired by his experiences in the country. While visiting Beijing in the north, he found that foreigners would be much more daring – “If I eat alone people will come and talk to me” – while those living south of Guangzhou city tend to be more shy and afraid to intrude.
This respect for others seemed a subtle sign of a collective mindset, and Talhelm began to find out what was behind the two views. The differences don’t seem to correlate with measures of wealth or modernization, but he sees one difference it could be in the types of staple crops grown in the region: rice in much of the south, and wheat in the north.
“It is divided almost very neatly along the Yangtze,” said Talhelm.
Growing rice requires more cooperation: it is more labor intensive and requires a complex irrigation system that includes many fields. Wheat fields, on the other hand, require half the work and depend on rainfall more than irrigation, meaning farmers don’t have to cooperate with their neighbors and can focus on managing their own crops.
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Can this difference be interpreted as a more collective or individualist mindset? Working with researchers in China, Talhelm tested more than 1,000 students in various rice and wheat growing areas, using measures such as the triad test from a holistic perspective. They also asked people to draw a chart depicting their relationship with their friends and peers: people in individualist circles tended to draw themselves bigger than their friends, whereas collective people tended to make everyone with same size. “Americans tend to draw themselves very large”, says Talhelm.
Of course, people in wheat growing areas tended to score higher on measures of individualism, whereas people in rice growing areas tended to show a more collective and holistic view. This also applies at the border between regions. “Here people live close together, but one grows rice and the other grows wheat – and we still find cultural differences.”
He has tested his hypothesis in India, which also shows clear differences in wheat and rice growing regions, with similar results. Almost all of the people he interviewed weren’t directly related to agriculture, of course – but the traditions passed down in their area still shape their views. “There is everything in culture”. https://agenqq365.org/
Cognitive kaleidoscope
It is important to emphasize that these are broad trends across many people; there will be a spectrum in each of the populations tested. “The idea that this is black and white – from an anthropological point of view, it can’t be,” said Delwar Hussain, an anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh, who worked with Mesoudi on a Bangladesh-British community study in London. As Hussain points out, there are many historical connections between Eastern and Western countries which means that some people have both ways of thinking, and factors such as age and social class also have an influence.
It has been seven years since Henrich published his study explaining the ‘Weird’ bias, and the response it has received has been quite positive. He was thrilled to learn that researchers like Talhelm were starting a big project to try to figure out a kaleidoscope of different ways of thinking. “You want a theory that explains why different populations have different psychology.”
But despite good intentions, further progress has been very slow. Money and time have enabled this worldview to be experimented with, most studies still testing ‘Weird’ participants at the expense of greater diversity. “We agree on the disease. The question is how it should be solved.”
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How Eastern and Western people think in completely different ways first appeared on
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