Uncertainty in Beijing

States that Asians and Americans have vastly differing conceptions of the self: autonomous in the West, interdependent in the East. Differences show up experimentally; Study by Frank Yates; Details; Results.

By PT Staff, published on January 01, 1992

Thinking Gap

Of the many matters that culturally divide East and West, count basic psychology among them. Asians and Americans have vastly differing conceptions of the self: autonomous in the West, interdependent in the East. Now you can add cognitive differences to the list as well, says a University of Michigan psychologist. And these are going to have to be reckoned with if the two worlds are ever going to make joint decisions.

The differences show up experimentally in answers to general-knowledge questions, finds Frank Yates, Ph.D. When asked to gauge their degree of certainty about answers to almanac-type questions--which city is farther north, London or New York, and how certain are you of the answer?--students in Beijing and the United States were equally accurate and equally overestimated their accuracy.

That struck Yates as odd. "We would have expected the Asians to be less over-confident, more modest."

Exploring further, he also found that the Chinese arrive at accuracy differently from Americans, who are better at calibration, or numerically labeling their degree of certainty. The Asians, on the other hand, excel at discrimination, which is the ability to distinguish when their answers were correct from the occasions when they were not.

"It's a lot easier to correct miscalibrations than discriminations," says Yates. "The findings suggest the Chinese may know something about judgment that we don't."

Yates believes it's a matter of how they process information. The Chinese, he says, have little tolerance for uncertainty. Their educational system traditionally rewards memorization-learning what the teacher knows. So they learn to tell the times when they know the answers from those when they don't. But they extract more diagnostic clues from their surroundings.

What it boils down to for Western business people is that the Chinese are reluctant to proceed without a great deal of data to support a decision. They appear as if they don't want to decide. Further, a 60% probability means different things to the Chinese and the Americans.