
How Culture Molds Habits of Thought (2000) - denzil_correa
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html
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bsenftner
Being that this article is 18 years old, I am quite curious the current
thoughts of the researchers, and to learn of any continued work in this area.
Fascinating area of research.
[http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/PatriciaCheng.html](http://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu/PatriciaCheng.html)

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joe_the_user
The thing about an experiment like this is I don't know how you'd distinguish
between "ways of thinking" and "styles of communication" here:

 _" 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.''"_

The article talks about artibution errors, where a series of movements gets
("wrongly" or "rightly") translated into a belief about intentions. I'd say it
would be more useful to talk of "attribution incompleteness" \- how one speaks
of a given scene needs the context of many scenes.

So maybe, in my interpretation, both Easterners and Westerners inherently have
to have the context of a large (and different) culture to speak of something
as simple as a film about a fish. But that's my interpretation of the
experiment and researchers gave their interpretation of the experiment and I'd
say such openness to interpretation probably makes any conclusion fairly
debatable.

Just generally, psychology experiments have quality of doing a high school
physics experiment except where the laws of physics are entirely unknown and
generally vary from place to place in an unknown fashion. In an ordinary
physics experiment, you can eliminate all but one or two variables and use
your test to find these. Here, you have a multitude of variables and can't
really eliminate any of them so you more or less pretend you can and thus add
to a stock of debate and unreproducible results.

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jm__87
How is how you communicate not related to how you think?

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watwut
People adjust the way they talk to audience and some study how they shoud
communicate.

The way I communicate is heavily influenced by what I consider correct way to
communicate. If you have me describe the scene, I may attempt to mimic the way
last book I read described similar scene.

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jm__87
Do you consciously think about what the correct way to communicate is before
you communicate something in an informal setting? If so I'd imagine you're an
outlier. For most people I would assume they don't think about this at all and
do whatever feels most natural.

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watwut
Yes I do, especially when the situation is new or weird in some way. Altrought
often it happens after and I use different phrasing next time similar
situation happens (e.g. I thing offline about how I told things and what
happened after). I don't think I am outlier, because most people talk
differently in front of different groups and also because I am more impulsive
then most.

In context of study as described in article, I would think about way I talk in
advance. If asked to analyze situation, I would do some social situation guess
to determine whether to talk about relationships, tech, whether use experience
or go strictly by text. How I want to look like and which part of me I want to
hide/keep secret would be a factor.

The "feels natural" part is influenced by your previous experiences too,
naturally.

