Uncertainty in Beijing

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.