Cultural Consciousness as a Good trick

Some possible implications of “Culture and Point of View” by Nisbett and Masuda (2003) from the perspective of a researcher into conscious awareness

The framework that Nisbett and Masuda (2003) develop may be of ultimate relevance to the attempt of many researchers to understand how our brain tends to generate a single consciousness interpretation of a given event. The article, Culture and Point of View, reviews a body of research that seeks to empirically demonstrate the relationship between culture and fundamental attentional and perceptual information processing abilities. Similar in principle to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis The contrast between the eastern and western societies arises from historical differences in social practices which have occurred over the past 2000 or so years (see Whorf, 1956) that differences in language are reflected in differences in cognition, Nisbett and Masuda (2003) attempt to demonstrate a relationship between social structure and the psychological structure of the mind. Given the growing emphasis on the role of culture in various recent accounts of consciousness, such as Dennett’s (1995, 1996) view that culture bootstraps psychological abilities, Susan Blakemore’s account of meme evolution (Blakemore, 2001) or the highly impressive abilities of the bonobo chimps reported by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues (Savage–Rumbaugh et al 1998), an empirical attempt to understand the emergent properties of our cultural upbringing is at the very least of hypothetical relevance to consciousness research.

The main emphasis in the Nisbett and Masuda (2003) paper is on the contrast between the eastern and western societies, which they argue arises from historical differences in social practices which have occurred over the last two thousand or so years. They suggest that “the cognitive differences [between eastern and western culture] derive in good part from perceptual differences, in particular what is attended to… and these differences in attention are driven by differences in social structure and practices” (Nisbett and Masuda, 2003 page 11169). Broadly, Eastern societies (China, Korea and Japan) are seen as developing out of a historical tradition of thought in which holistic influences is emphasised, whilst logic was never formalised. The Western tradition (Europe and North America) is suggested to have developed out of the Aristotelian formalisation of logic in search of ultimate causes. Consistent with this view students in Eastern countries are seen as more likely to attend to the “broad conceptual field” than are western students (Americans). For example, eastern students are more likely to make attributions based on context (Morris and Peng 1994; Peng and Knowles, 2003), are happier with contradictions, seeking the “middle way” rather than rejecting one of two contradictory positions (Peng and Nisbett, 1999) and tend to make classification judgements based on family resemblances rather than rules (Norenzayan et al. 2002).

What is potentially remarkable about the differences described by Nisbett and Masuda (2003) is that they are also detectable at an attentional and perceptual level: the traditional domain of cognitive psychology. One ability that seems to vary cross culturally, is co-variation detection, which refers to the “the process by which organisms discover the relation between pairs of variables” (Anderson 1995, page 26). Studies suggest that eastern students are more inclined to detect co-variation, and were more confident when doing so, than western students (Ji et al 2000). Similarly, field dependence, which reflects the ability to separate the object from its surroundings, also Cultural consciousness may shed light on the binding problem varies across culture, with eastern students demonstrating higher levels of field dependence than western students (Ji et al 2000). Moreover, this field dependence led Japanese students to be unable to correctly identify a previously seen object (in this case a fish) when the background was changed. By contrast, American students were unaffected by changes to the background. One possible consequence of the cross cultural differences which emerge in the work of Nisbett and colleagues is that differences in cultural upbringing may pre-dispose the manner that an individual directs their attention to a given scene.

That cultural differences may attenuate our tendency to separate the figure from the ground, for example, suggests that we are dealing with fundamental differences in how objects are distinguished and we have no reason to believe that these differences do not correspond to differences in how our brains express the relevant stimulus. From the perspective of someone researching consciousness, it seems plausible that that the cross-cultural differences in psychological properties examined by Nisbett and colleagues, such as field dependence, may shed light on one important aspect of information processing associated with conscious awareness, the binding problem. The binding problem refers to the attempt to understand the process by which “the brain in some way binds together, in a mutually coherent way, all those neurons actively responding to a different aspect of a perceived object” (Crick, 1990, page 208). The issue of binding is particularly important to understanding consciousness because it seems on the face of it that there seem to be as many potential interpretations of a visual scene as there are well formed sentences in a language (Crick, 1990).

In this context, if our cultural up-bringing provides us with a set of internalised skills which direct our attention to particular aspects of the environment, this might serve to reduce the perceived complexity of any given situation. A plausible hypothesis based on the work of Nisbett and Masuda (2003) is that our cultural upbringing may bootstrap our psychological abilities by providing us with an epistemological framework which serves to pre-dispose the psychological interpretation of a set of circumstances in one or other direction. In this sense, fundamental differences in the structure of our social system might provide a heuristic system that serves to reduce the informational complexity of a given situation. The notion of ambiguity reduction presents a novel perspective on how culture might bootstrap our psychological abilities, given that a key functional advantage of the “limited capacity” of consciousness is that it provides a single interpretation of a visual scene, a quality that facilitates fast and direct action (Ramachandran and Hirsten, 1997). By reducing informational complexity, in this manner, our cultural up-bringing would serve to facilitate direct action.

Overall, it is a tremendous achievement of Nisbett and colleagues to have developed a cultural framework in which information-processing differences emerge from socio-historical patterns of interaction as this offers a potential account of how culture might bootstrap our psychological abilities. Admittedly, this view has its critics, primarily in terms of methodological rigour and in terms of the exposition of historical regularities that Nisbett and colleagues employ (see Ratner and Hui, 2003) and the degree to which the framework is ultimately validated will determine the extent to which the ideas presented in the paper become relevant to mainstream consciousness research. It is only future experimentation, for example, which will determine whether the environmental and cultural influences experienced throughout ones development may have measurable consequences for the mechanisms through which conscious experience is expressed in the brain. Irrespective of this issue, however, Nisbett and colleagues have a developed a specific account of the development of cultural and environmental influences on information processing abilities as it may have occurred, which is supported by the available data. If we take seriously the view suggested by Dennett (1995,1996) and many others that consciousness and other good tricks that our brains employ, are an emergent property of the interaction between the workings of innately specified brain modules and the social system within which we exist, then as researchers we cannot afford to ignore the framework presented by Nisbett and Masuda (2003) which represents an important empirical starting point for this investigation.

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