In this chapter we’ve seen that modern Asians, like the ancient Chinese, view the world in holistic terms: They see a great deal of the field, especially background events; they are skilled in observing relationships between events; they regard the world as complex and highly changeable and its components as interrelated; they see events as moving in cycles between extremes; and they feel that control over events requires coordination with others. Modern Westerners, like the ancient Greeks, see the world in analytic, atomistic terms; they see objects as discrete and separate from their environments; they see events as moving in linear fashion when they move at all; and they feel themselves to be personally in control of events even when they are not.
I remember reading about how different languages can affect the way you think. In this book, the author expands it towards different cultures, especially between the Western and the Asian world.
The differences in how both east and west sees the world also affects marketing decisions from corporations. In the book, Niabett talks about how advertisements that focuses on collective aspects (bringing people together) worked better in Korea while advertisements that focused on individual benefits yielded better results in the United States.
The different ways we behave, does extend further questions into the fields of education and business. How do we educate the various cultures in the same classroom (if we had to)? For workplace environments, how can we adjust and fit people from various cultures to have more diversity?
There are many more nuances into how we are different and I’ll be sharing more passages from this book for the next few days.
