Essay On Culture And Blindness

One of the most interesting aspects about human beings is that, even though we are similar in terms of physiology, our behavior and perspectives of the world can vary depending on our culture. We may all have the same structures in our brain but yet, we process information in a distinctive many ways and focus our attention to different things. Nowadays, with research methods, researchers can discover and compare those differences between cultures around the world. In the article, Culture and Blindness, the researchers Takahiko Masuda and Richard E. Nisbett explained the results of studies made to understand the differences between Westerners and East Asians in terms of perceptual processes. The studies examined the propositions related to …show more content…
On the other hand, East Asians perceive the world in a holistic way, paying more attention to the entire field in a picture. This evidence was found by creating an experiment with Japanese and American college students. They showed these participants a series of animated vignettes of underwater pictures for 20 seconds in order to analyze what they perceived. The researchers discovered that American students focused more on the salient objects, the more noticeable ones. However, the Japanese students focused more on the context or background, such as changes in the water or the rocks (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006). The authors in this article also explained that the environment and the socialization between parents and their children of Western and Eastern cultures can have a big impact in the way the children focus their attention later in life. The style that Eastern parents use to talk to their children differs from the style Americans use. They use different words and phrases to name objects or events and teach different perspectives to understand events. Thus, children develop under distinct concepts and differ at how they see the world when they grow up (Masuda & Nisbett,