This chapter was quite interesting overall in my opinion. Even in the very beginning, textbook mentions how hunters are better at perceiving objects independent from each other and herders are more independent in social orientation than the rice farmers. The type of farming one does (rice vs wheat) also affects this. This information in itself is quite amazing since it means even in the same culture one’s occupation can determine their character or perhaps it is the opposite in some situations. It just makes me wonder how much of our character we can really rule. Along with the previous weeks we talked about many things that determine our thought patterns and characters including type of society, language and the environment. They are more understandable but occupation affecting the individual in such a way is quite interesting and perhaps scary to some extent.
In the chapter and mainly in the cultural discourse part there were many mentionings of Taoist philosophy and it got compared to Ancient Greek philosophy. I am personally quite interested in taoist philosophy but I am also very interested in Nietzschean philosophy as well. Considering that Taoism origins in China and Nietzsche was a German philosopher (who was deeply influenced by Ancient Greece) makes the comparison rather accurate since China is kind of like a poster child for collectivist cultures and Germany is the poster child for individualist cultures. In Taoism it is much more about being in harmony with the nature, not forcing life but rather flowing with it. In the Nietzschean philosophy on the other hand emphasis is on the power, individuals psychological freedom from the masses of people and reaching something beyond human through suffering. This indeed grants and stems from the holistic thinking style for Chinese and analytical thinking style for the Western but it also goes way beyond what chapter briefly offers us. I want to give one more example since I find this chapter very interesting. The chapter already mentions Protestants/Calvinists and Max Weber ties the capitalism’s expansion to the expansion of Protestants/Calvinists ethics which has a very strong work ethic. This strong work ethic and growing capitalism requires much more energy to function and thus the coffee becomes the mainstream drink. Therefore in a way even what we consume can be determined by the cultural discourses.
Causal attribution part was intriguing. I wonder if it works the same when the individuals are judging themselves. Does the tendency to blame situation or the individual works the same whether the individual is them or someone else? Another fascinating part was about how the Canadians were selling stocks when their value was going down and buying when its value was going up and the Chinese were doing the exact opposite. Economic theories are constructed upon the idea that humans will be rational but rationality may not always be the same thing apparently.
I can not comment much on the article because it has mixed results and they were not as expected. Maybe what we should gain from this article is the doubt. Perhaps the differences are less about cultural factors and more about situations and testing conditions and we should be even more cautious while conducting experiments.
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