• EA Weekly

Neuroscience and culture in the mind

• 27 July 2023

by Christine Winskowski    What does neuroscience add to our understanding of culture and cross-cultural encounters? I was thinking about this as I listened to Sheena Iyengar’s vignette in the lead-in video illustrating an East-West cultural difference: A Western restaurant customer in Japan (Iyengar herself) wants her green tea served with sugar. The staff does not want to serve green tea adulterated with sugar; it isn’t done. A classic culture clash.  The study of cultural difference has divided into two approaches. The first is focused on social, ethnic, and institutional levels, and addresses group values, beliefs, customs, norms, reasoning, and other shared patterns. An excellent illustration of this approach to culture comes from Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought (2003). Nisbett addresses the historical and social/psychological foundations of ancient East Asian (China) and Western (Greek) thought, behavior, and society. Then he shows that modern East-West manifestations of mentality, from cross-cultural research, can be traced back to those ancient roots—communalism (East) vs. individualism (West); harmony (East) vs. agency (West); focus on context (East) vs. on the object (West); patterns of reasoning and thinking, etc. Nisbett’s findings were a revelation to me, especially in reference to Western culture. Instructors working with East-West cultural differences in their classrooms would find his work a very practical source for integrating culture with language teaching for their students.  Before, during, and since