Check out this image. What do you see?
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| Source: Richard Nisbett via CNN.com |
In this article for CNN, Columbia Professor Sheena Iyengar describes how people of different cultures view this picture quite differently, and she explains what that tells about important cross-cultural distinctions. Iyengar is an expert on cross-cultural differences in decision-making processes. Here is an excerpt:
The image here, known in psychology as the Michigan Fish Test, was
presented to American and Japanese participants in a study conducted by
Richard Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda. In their five-second
viewing, Americans paid more attention to the large fish, the "main
characters" of the scene, while Japanese described the scene more
holistically. For Americans, the large fish were the powerful agents,
influencing everything around them. For Japanese, the environment
dominated, interacting with and influencing all the characters. After
the initial test, the researchers offered participants different
versions of the fish picture, with some elements changed and some not.
With the altered pictures, the Japanese were more likely to notice
changes in the scenery or context. The Americans, on the other hand,
proved adept at recognizing the large fish wherever they appeared, while
the Japanese had more trouble recognizing the fish in new contexts,
outside the original environment. So members of two different
cultures--the more individualist Americans and the more collectivist
Japanese--"saw" the pictures with differing emphasis on individuals, the
environment, and how these elements interacted. The divergent accounts
point to differing narratives of what controls what in the world, and
how individual people fit into it.
For more on Iyengar's own research comparing how Japanese and American children approach choice, see this earlier blog post.
