Cultural Exercise - Research Paper Example

Cultural Exercise Different cultural context play a role in attribution in different ways. Some people like explainingthe events of life in terms of situation context while others like explain in terms of presumed dispositions. The Asians like explaining the events of life in terms of situation while the Americans like explaining the events in terms of the disposition. This is attributed to the fact that the Asians were influence by the Chinese culture while the Americans were influenced by the Greek culture.

The Greek culture brought about disposition since the Greeks had analytical stance, their focusing in an object was to categorize it in reference to attributes and explaining the object behavior by use of rules about its class membership (Norenzayan and Nisbett, 2000). On the other, the Chinese people had a holistic stance, in the sense that they had interest in the area in which the object is found and a tendency to explain matter behavior in terms of its relationship with the area found (Norenzayan and Nisbett, 2000).

A study shows that a Chinese newspaper explains murder incident in form of situation factors that surrounds the targeted person while the American newspaper explains in terms of disposition on the target person. A study carried out by lee et al shows that American sports analyst and coaches attribute the player performance in terms of its internal factors while Hong Kong sports analyst and coaches attributes players’ performance to external factors such as whether and the quality of the playing ground.

History shows that Chinese and Greek science was very different in terms of their strengths and weakness. Greek science uses universal rules to explain objects and they were categorizing objects in respect to their core. The Chinese science was practical and concrete and they were not interested in foundation. Since the Asian people belief that causality is in the field, they always visit the field, the western people believe that causality is inside the object hence they pay more attention to the object rather than the field.

It is hard for the Asians to separate the object from the field because of the concept of field dependence. This refers to a situation in which the object cannot be separated from the filed found in. It is believed that Chinese culture brought about presumed disposition from farming. It is well known that Chinese have been engaging in vigorous farming since time immemorial before the Europeans started farming. For farmers to succeed they should be cooperative with each other and farmers’ societies are collective in nature.

This focus on social field brought about the holistic understanding hence developing situation culture. In Greek intensive farming is not carried out due to its terrain (Norenzayan and Nisbett, 2000). The Greek earn a living by keeping animals and trade, these professional do not need a lot of cooperation that is why the Greek became highly individualistic. This kind of individualistic encourages a person to attend an object with one specific goal. The societies continue to display those mentalities and it has persisted to date.

Research conducted by several researchers including Witkin and his contemporaries shows that holistic and analytical cognition came from collectivities and individualism. Farmers are found to be filed dependent than industrialized people; American groups that live under tight social constraints tend to be field dependant while those who are accustomed to social relationship are field dependent. In an experiment conducted, the Americans and Asian students was shown under water several things which include fish, animals, water plants and rocks.

When the students was asked to explain what they have seen under water, the American students reported little information about the fish while the Asian students reported almost everything in details found in water, they also explain the interactions between the fish and other objects in water. After watching the scene, the students was shown a fish in a different scene, the Asians students could not recognize the fish in a different scene while American student could recognize it; this means that the American student was not influenced by the manipulation.

This shows that the Asians students are not only interested with the object that is fish, but they are also interested with the environment that surrounds the fish include the interaction between the fish and water unlike the American students who are only interested with the fish. These studies should be extended such that education studies should take into account the cultural context of the student, whether the student have a situation context or presumed dispositions. Students should be taught in line with their cultural context to enable them learn effectively.

References Ara, Norenzayan and Richard, Nisbett. (2000). Culture and Causal Cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol.9(4), p.132-136 Richard Nisbett. (1998). Situational salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and actor-observer bias. Society for personality and social psychology. Vol.24(9), p.949-960 Choi,I., Nisbett,R.E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin. vol.125. p.47-63.