How Culture Changes Perception

How Culture Molds Habits of Thought was the article for this week. The author starts off by describing how many social scientists have always believed that logic plays the different roles in different cultures. The article followed Dr. Nisbett as he carries out experiments to examine how people of different cultures think differently. The experiment that I found most striking was the experiment about describing the fishes in the tank. Whereas the Japanese tended to point out the fish compared to other objects, Americans would point out the largest fish or the shiniest rock. I know that our culture place stress on being the biggest or the best, but I never realized how something like that could affect how we describe a setting. Another experiment that stood out to me was experiment where the argument between mother and daughter were presented. Americans tended to choose a side quickly, but Chinese subjects took into both arguments consideration and decided that both sides had misunderstandings. This also made me realize how opinionated Americans are. Once we’ve developed our beliefs it’s substantially difficult to persuade us otherwise. Reading this article heightened my awareness of how much our culture influences our perception of the world around us.

Similarly, in class we talked about our perception of other cultures and how they may perceive us. We read about the “Nacerima” and “ Racs”. When our class began to talk about these cultures we pointed out how peculiar the different aspects of their cultures were in comparison to ours. We didn’t realize it at the time but not only were we being ethnocentric, the article was actually a description of American culture from an ethnocentric stand point. In retrospect it seems as though the culture of the author of the Nacerima may have put a stress on religion or the supernatural because they continually described different aspects of the culture in respect to religion. For instance, the author describes bathing as a shrine that humans must got to daily. On the other hand, we thought it was strange that the people of this tribe had to go through so many strange religious rituals because our culture doesn’t necessarily place that much stress on religion. In all this, one can see how cultural background plays a huge role in our perception of the world around us. Ethnocentrism can be seen on a day to day basis. For instance, a few days ago I was talking to one of my Nigerian guy friends about attractive guys. He was giving his opinion on which ones were attractive and which ones weren’t. However, later when I asked one of my American guy friends he said he didn’t know and that judging another guys appearance would be “really gay”. Both guys were heterosexual, the only thing that changed was their perception due to cultural differences.

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