(May 16, 2021 at 7:31 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: One point of clarification is that these are review articles not research articles.
Yes, that's important, I think. Each of the individual research papers will be at best a tiny tile in a mosaic, and this kind of review is necessary. Building the big picture from the largest possible set of results.
Quote:Here is the link to one of the studies they presented in the review: Attending Holistically v. Analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans
This was very interesting to me, largely because I'm an American who's lived in Japan most of my life and often discuss cultural differences with people.
There were two concerns that came to mind when I saw the abstract of the paper:
1) It is an extremely strong cultural cliche -- a received idea -- that Americans are individualists and Japanese are group-oriented. My experience has been that this is true in some ways and not in others. In some situations the pressure to conform is stronger in America than it is here. So I read carefully to see if the researchers had built this assumption into the methodology.
As far as I can tell, they didn't assume this conclusion. They expected it, but they also designed that test in such a way that if the Japanese subjects had responded in an object-oriented way (rather than a context-oriented way) as much as the Americans did, that would have shown up in the results. Then they might have had to say "we were surprised to find...." So they avoided begging the question.
2) As always, the number of test subjects is small, and they are all university students. So that's a limitation. Kyoto University is extremely difficult to get into, and the psych department is pretty famous -- which means that the subjects in the study are pre-selected to have a high level of ambition and a certain kind of testable intelligence. Ideally, you'd give the same test to cohorts of Japanese rock musicians, road workers, and criminals and see if the results were similar. But in part this is taken care of by comparing the results with American college students, who will be more or less of the same type. I don't know how U. of Mich. compares with Kyoto academically.
So I think it's an interesting study that will add one tile to that big mosaic. If we keep in mind that it's a very large and always-shifting mosaic, we won't conclude too much from just the one study. But I don't think anybody is expecting some kind of enormous proof. With the results of the study in mind, though, it can have some bearing on our interpretations when we encounter Japanese things. For example, if you think about The Tale of Genji, events are always embedded in such a wealth of aesthetic and atmospheric detail that we could take it as nicely consistent with the study's research results. Not that this is proof of anything, but it enriches our interpretation.
(Anecdotally, I can say that my experience also supports the study. When my wife -- who is Japanese -- comes home and tells me about something that happened that day, her narration will include so much context and so many long dependent clauses, colorful asides, and digressions, that I may not be able to pick out what the main event was.)
