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23 Nov 09

Western Men Are Doomed - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

David Brooks: Asians place emphasis on context while Westerners place more emphasis on individuals. This seems like a gross generalization but it is robustly supported by hundreds and hundreds of studies. Richard Nisbett’s book, “The Geography of Thought” summarizes some of the evidence.

If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.

The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed.
David Brooks: I haven’t even mentioned gender differences yet. I think the same things I’ve said about Asians can be said about women as compared to men.

I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read this stuff as part of your book research, but my understanding is that the cognitive processing of male and female brains is mostly the same except for in one area: social cognition. Women, on average, pick up more social signals.
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- Gail Collins: Still skeptical. Given the long span of time in which women were said to be particularly well-suited for everything from typing (tiny fingers) to domesticity (“She has a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.”) I’m becoming increasingly leery of giving too much credence to theories about how any group is particularly well adapted to anything.
- Gail Collins: Ah, what I hear is the sound of a group that was on top for so long and then goes into a funk at the first sign of really serious competition. As a nation, we’re in trauma over the very idea that anybody else might be the economic superpower. As a gender, guys who were perfectly fine with the idea of women in business or in Congress are totally unnerved with the thought that their gender someday actually might not be running the show.

29 Oct 09

Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution : Discovery News

dsc.discovery.com/...culture-genes-evolution.html - Preview

genetics genes culture science statistics reference china asia europe collectivism individualism

Culture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes, according to a study released Wednesday that compares individualist and group-oriented societies across the globe.
most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood.
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- In China and other east Asian nations, for example, up to 80 percent of the population carry this so-called "short" allele, or variant, of a stretch of DNA known as 5-HTTLPR.
- Earlier research has shown the S allele to be strongly linked with a range of negative emotions, including anxiety and depression.
  
  Critically, it is also associated with the impulse to stay out of harm's way.
- By contrast, in countries of European origin that prize self-expression and the pursuit of individual over group goals, the long or "L" allele dominates, with only 40 percent of people carrying the "S" variant.
- Ancient cultures in Asia, Africa and Latin America highly exposed to deadly pathogens, they conjecture, may have tended toward collectivist norms in order to better combat disease.