Cultural Difference in the Age of Covid-19. Part II
Koreans eating dinner.
In a previous post I introduced some rather broad-brush theory coming from the contemporary French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien concerning differences between Western and East Asian cultures in order to place responses to the current Covid-19 crisis in some kind of wider historical and social context.
In this post, I want to explore the ideas of a couple of Western social psychologists, to see what light they might shed on the issue.
Significant empirical research into psychological behaviour has revealed how even such a basic core concept as the understanding of ‘selfhood’ is determined by the cultural-historical environment and ossifies into recursive patterns of behaviour. The Canadian social psychologist Stephen Heine discusses an East Asian cultural bias towards what he calls the ‘interdependent self’, in which individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of relationships. This Heine contrasts to a Western model primarily based on the idea of an ‘autonomous self’, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others.
Echoing Heine, the American social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett has also identified two contrasting cognitive styles - ‘analytic’ (West) and ‘holistic’ (East). ‘Analytic thought’, he writes, “dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways”, and as a result “lends itself to being captured in language”. ‘Holistic thought,’ by contrast, “responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and […] makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to linguistic representation.” Consequently, as Nisbett notes, “to the Asian the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”. In the Western’s case, on the other hand, “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control.”
It isn’t difficult to see how these basically different understandings of the self’s relationship the world might impact on how societies respond to a viral pandemic. For example, it is interesting to consider how it might affect the use of a face mask. I often see Koreans walking around wearing a mask even in the countryside, far from crowds, as if they believe that the virus is in the air, and could be contracted. As a Westerner, I stubbornly hold to a way of understanding contagion that is in line with Nisbett’s analysis of the Western mindset, and therefore believe that the virus can be understood in terms of a person to person infection within a mindset in which “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context.”
What if I was considering the virus from within a mindset in which “the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”? Perhaps I too would be a little more holistic in my understanding of how viral contagion happens.
For more information:
Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and why, Free Press, 2010.
Steven B. Jackson, ‘Chatting Up Culture With Steven Heine: Part I and II’, Psychology Today, Online April 26 and April 30, 2012.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-i https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-ii