REPOST: THE IMPACT OF CULTURE ON PERCEPTION

What I’ve been saying all along.

For more about this, read my autobiography — and try to understand how Westerners might be viewed by someone with a very different cultural perspective (myself at 16).

A main cultural difference I see is that even in Zimbabwe — which has had huge racial conflicts — the culture/s there do not go in for identity politics with anything like the same self-certainty and gusto that they do in the West. This is due to the differences between white and black Zimbabwean culture and Western ontological categorising tendencies — we are not viewed as being so different from each other, rather we are seen as contrasting and conflicting tribes.

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HOW CULTURE MOLDS HABITS OF THOUGHT

BY ERICA GOODE

QUOTE

In the broadest sense, the studies — carried out in the United States, Japan, China and Korea — document a familiar division. Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more “holistically,” paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more “analytic” in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic.