Mock Test 23.2 | Academic Reading

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

The Link Between Culture and Thought

A.   Fore more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have based their discussions of thought patterns on one basic principle: that the same processes underlie all human thought, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of Africa. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Cultural differences might dictate what people thought about. Teenage boys in remote areas of Africa, for example, might discuss cows with the same passion that New York teenagers reserved for sports cars. But the strategies people adopted in processing information and making sense of the world around them -- were, Western scholars assumed, the same for everyone.

B.   However, recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside down. [Crack IELTS with Rob] In a series of studies comparing European Americans (representing ‘Westerners’) to East Asians (representing ‘Easterners’), Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things: they think differently. Actually researchers were not the first psychological researchers to propose that thought may be embedded in cultural assumptions. For example, Soviet psychologists of the 1930's posed logical problems to Uzbek peasants, arguing that intellectual tools were influenced by pragmatic circumstances. But University of Michigan work has been of interest in academic circles because it tries to define and elaborate on cultural differences through a series of tightly controlled laboratory experiments. In the broadest sense, the Michigan studies -- carried out in the United States, Japan, China and Korea -- document a  basic contrast between East and West, and doing so they raise questions about the assumptions of cognitive psychology that have been made for the past half a century.

C.  In one study, for example, by Dr. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, a graduate student at Michigan, students from Japan and the United States were shown an animated underwater scene, in which one larger ''focal'' fish swam among smaller fishes and other aquatic life. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, ''There was a lake or pond'' or ''The bottom was rocky,'' or ''The water was green.'' Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the largest fish, making statements like ''There was what looked like a trout swimming to the right.'' Overall, Japanese subjects in the study made 70 percent more statements about aspects of the background environment than Americans, and twice as many statements about the relationships between animate and inanimate objects. A Japanese subject might note, for example, that ''The big fish swam past the gray seaweed.'' And, the greater attention paid by East Asians to context and relationship was more than just superficial, the researchers found. Shown the same larger fish swimming against a different, novel background, Japanese participants had more difficulty recognizing it than Americans. This indicated that their perception of the Japanese was closely dependent upon what they saw in the background.

D.  In another study, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Incheol Choi, found that Easterners were more likely than Westerners to appreciate both sides of an argument. The researchers presented groups of Koreans and Americans with very convincing arguments in support of a particular position. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Both the Koreans and the Americans at first expressed strong support for that position. However, when the groups were then presented with arguments opposing the initial position, the Korean subjects generally modified and decreased their support for that position, while the Americans actually increased their original support.

E.   In yet another study, again focusing on Americans and Koreans, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in conflict, Westerners are more likely than Easterners to stick to the rules of formal logic. [Crack IELTS with Rob] For example, presented with a logical sequence like, ''All animals with fur hibernate. Rabbits have fur. Therefore rabbits hibernate.'' The Americans were more likely to accept the validity of the series of statements. They assumed the conclusion must be true because of the logical structure of the arguments. The Korean subjects, by contrast, more frequently judged the argument as invalid based on their own understanding that it was not actually true -- not all animals with fur do in fact hibernate.

F.   While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence suggests that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has existed at least since ancient times. [Crack IELTS with Rob] How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social and religious practices, different languages or even different geography is anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages, and both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the genes: many Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable in their modes of thought from European-Americans. According to Dr. Alan Fiske says, “In my field we discuss the way these different groups talk and interact. But these descriptions are qualitative in nature rather than being controlled as an experiment would be, so Dr. Nisbett’s research is a valuable complement to our work.” Yet not everyone agrees that all Dr. Nisbett’s findings reflect fundamental differences in psychological process. Psychologist Dr. Patricia Cheng finds some of the findings matched some of her personal experiences. But she says, “I think that some differences -- the Asian tolerance for contradiction, for example -- are purely social.” Still, to the extent that the studies reflect real differences in thinking and perception, psychologists may have to radically revise their ideas about what is universal and what is not, and to develop new models of mental process that take cultural influences into account.