Neuroscience
The way we see ourselves in the world can affect how we answer ambiguous questions like: “Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now on?”
If you see yourself as moving through time, then you're more likely to think the meeting will be on Friday. By contrast, if you see time as passing you by, you're more likely to think the meeting has changed to Monday. Try it on your friends.
Now Angela Leung and Dov Cohen have used ambiguous questions like this to test the contrasting perspectives of Asian Americans and European Americans.
For example, participants from these racial backgrounds were told about a scenario in which they had gone to meet a friend at a skyscraper, but as they were in the lift going up to the 94th floor, their friend was in another lift heading down to the reception.
Next, the participants were given a map showing the city 'Jackson'. They were asked to mark the location of the city 'Jamestown', which they were told ambiguously was the next city “after” Jackson on the north-south highway.
The idea is that participants who imagined the skyscraper story from their own perspective would mark Jamestown as the next city north of Jackson (because they'd imagined going up in the lift in the story), whereas participants who imagined the skyscraper story from their friend's perspective would mark Jamestown as being south.
Taken together with other examples, the researchers found Asian Americans were more likely to adopt the perspective of their friend in these social scenarios rather than to adopt their own perspective. European Americans showed the opposite trend.
Leung and Cohen said this shows how our cultural values our embodied in the way we see ourselves in the world. Asian Americans who, they said, place value on “thinking how your actions will look to other people” tend to visualise social situations from a third person “camera angle”. European Americans, by contrast, who endorse values like “knowing what you want” tend to visualise situations from their own perspective.
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Leung, K.L. & Cohen, D. (2007). The soft embodiment of culture. Camera angles and motion through time and space. Psychological Science, 18, 824-830.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Asian Americans and European Americans differ in how they see themselves in the world
The way we see ourselves in the world can affect how we answer ambiguous questions like: “Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now on?”If you see yourself as moving through time, then you're more likely to think the meeting will be on Friday. By contrast, if you see time as passing you by, you're more likely to think the meeting has changed to Monday. Try it on your friends.
Now Angela Leung and Dov Cohen have used ambiguous questions like this to test the contrasting perspectives of Asian Americans and European Americans.
For example, participants from these racial backgrounds were told about a scenario in which they had gone to meet a friend at a skyscraper, but as they were in the lift going up to the 94th floor, their friend was in another lift heading down to the reception.
Next, the participants were given a map showing the city 'Jackson'. They were asked to mark the location of the city 'Jamestown', which they were told ambiguously was the next city “after” Jackson on the north-south highway.
The idea is that participants who imagined the skyscraper story from their own perspective would mark Jamestown as the next city north of Jackson (because they'd imagined going up in the lift in the story), whereas participants who imagined the skyscraper story from their friend's perspective would mark Jamestown as being south.
Taken together with other examples, the researchers found Asian Americans were more likely to adopt the perspective of their friend in these social scenarios rather than to adopt their own perspective. European Americans showed the opposite trend.
Leung and Cohen said this shows how our cultural values our embodied in the way we see ourselves in the world. Asian Americans who, they said, place value on “thinking how your actions will look to other people” tend to visualise social situations from a third person “camera angle”. European Americans, by contrast, who endorse values like “knowing what you want” tend to visualise situations from their own perspective.
____________________________________
Leung, K.L. & Cohen, D. (2007). The soft embodiment of culture. Camera angles and motion through time and space. Psychological Science, 18, 824-830.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- What Your Facebook Picture Says About Your Cultural Background
What kind of profile picture do you have on Facebook? Is it a close-up shot of your lovely face with little background visible? Or is it zoomed out, so that you appear against a wider context? The answer, according to a new study by psychologists in the...
- The Surprising Links Between Anger And Time Perception
The way we think about abstract concepts like time is grounded in physical metaphors. For example, we talk about re-arranged events being moved from one day to another, as if through space. Similarly, there is a metaphorical, embodied aspect to our emotions...
- Want To Achieve Something? Picture Yourself Doing It From A Third-person Perspective
'Visualise yourself doing it' is a common slice of advice for people seeking to achieve something. But there are two ways of visualising yourself in a scene: from a first-person perspective as in real-life, or from an external perspective, as...
- Neuropsychology Abstract Of The Day: Cerad Assessment
Norms for CERAD Constructional Praxis Recall Clinical Neuropsychol. 2011 Oct 13 Fillenbaum GG, Burchett BM, Unverzagt FW, Rexroth DF, Welsh-Bohmer K Abstract Recall of the four-item constructional praxis measure was a later addition to the Consortium...
- One Of My Favorite Reference Books
Ah, the Statistical Abstract of the United States. 2007 edition is out, and the Times has a story about it: Who Americans Are and What They Do, in Census Data By SAM ROBERTS Published: December 15, 2006 "Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled...