Acupuncture is a model case for teaching the cultural contexts of science. Acupuncture has been practiced in China for centuries, but American scientists were largely skeptical of its efficacy when exposed to it in the early 1970s. Chinese doctors explain the phenomenon using a conception of the body unfamiliar to Westerners. Western physiologists have in the past few decades been able to expla...

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall, the iconic symbol of the Cold War, fell. Its disappearance marked the end of the repressive, communist regime of East Germany (hereafter GDR, German Democratic Republic) and offered prospects for a more hopeful future for its former citizens. Ossis (Easterners) could now take advantage of a variety of personal and civic freedoms. Integration into the larger, m...

Growing cross-cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however, appears not to be caused by an absence of disp...

There is recent evidence that perceptual processes are influenced by culture. Westerners tend to engage in context-independent and analytic perceptual processes by focusing on a salient object independently of its context, whereas Asians tend to engage in context-dependent and holistic perceptual processes by attending to the relationship between the object and the context in which the object i...

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The...

In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise ...

We propose a theory of how systems of thought arise on the basis of differing cultural practices and argue that the theory accounts for substantial differences in East Asian and Western thought processes. We find East Asians to be more holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on “dialectical” ...

Previous research suggests that members of East Asian cultures show a greater sensitivity to context (vs. target) information than do members of Western Cultures. We suggest this difference is rooted in a greater chronic fear of isolation (FOI) in East Asians than in Westerners. To support this hypothesis, we first compare chronic levels of FOI between East Asian and Western participants. Then ...

Media coverage can affect audiences’ perceptions of immigrants, and play a role in determining the content public policy agendas, formation prejudices, prevalence negative stereotyping. This study investigated way which immigrants are represented Danish media, terms used, what issues related to immigration discussed how they described, whose voices heard. The data consisted media articles publi...