How Knowledge About Different Cultures Is Shaking the Foundations of Psychology

How Knowledge About Different Cultures Is Shaking the Foundations of Psychology

Nicolas Geeraert

In a classic demonstration of cultural differences in thinking styles, participants from Japan and the USA were presented with a series of animated scenes. Lasting about 20 seconds, each scene showed various aquatic creatures, vegetation and rocks in an underwater setting. In a subsequent recall task, both groups of participants were equally likely to remember salient objects, the larger fish. But the Japanese participants were better than American participants at recalling background information, such as the colour of the water. This is because holistic thinking focuses on background and context just as much as foreground.

This clearly demonstrates how cultural differences can affect something as fundamental as memory – any theory describing it should take that into account. Subsequent studies have shown that cultural differences in thinking styles are pervasive in cognition – affecting memory, attention, perception, reasoning and how we talk and think.