From the always cool [epiphenom] blog, Tom Rees looks at some old research on how culture impacts whether we are Big Picture people, or details people - and a new study that looks at the impact of religion in this same context.
Here are the studies Rees looks at the article:
Colzato LS, Beest I, van den Wildenberg WP, Scorolli C, Dorchin S, Meiran N, Borghi AM, & Hommel B (2010). God: Do I have your attention? Cognition, 117 (1), 87-94 PMID: 20674890
Lorenza S. Colzato, Bernhard Hommel, Wery Van Den Wildenberg, & Shulan Hsieh (2010). Buddha as an eye opener: A link between prosocial attitude and attentional control Frontiers in Cognition : 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00156
This reminds me of a story Ken Gergen relates in his Relational Being about a foreign aid worker in Africa showing a film about optimal planting and harvesting to the folks with whom they are working. Following the film, the workers ask the villagers about what they had seen, and one them replied, "The chicken, the chicken." The aid workers were confused - the film was about planting crops, not chickens - there was no chicken in the film.Seeing the big picture
Are you a big-picture person, or do you tune into the detail? Surprisingly, the culture in which you were raised - including your religion (or lack of it) can shape this fundamental aspect of your personality.A decade ago, researchers found that while westerners were relatively faster at picking out the component parts of a picture, Asians were relatively quicker to see the global, holistic components. They reckoned this was an effect of cultural differences - the individualistic Westerners versus the collective, community-oriented Asians.
In a new series of studies, Lorenza Colzato, a cognitive psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues has shown that, within both of these culture, religion can affect where attention is focussed. Remarkably, it seems that the type of religion, not religion itself, is the critical factor.
The tests use something called a global-local task. Essentially, the subjects are shown either a square or a rectangle, which are themselves made up of smaller squares and rectangles. The task is to spot the shape of either the 'big' picture or its components.
Pretty much everyone is faster at identifying the big shape. Asians, however, are even faster than Westerners - but at the cost of slower identification of the smaller component shapes.
But all the villagers insisted on the chicken, so the aid workers returned the film and watched closely. They were surprised to notice that in an important segment of the film, there was a chicken wandering around in what for the aid workers was the meaningless background.
Different cultures privilege different elements of a scene.
So in the new study, Lorenza Colzato and her colleagues show that within a culture, religious beliefs can alter attentional focus.
Colzato compared a group of Dutch Calvinist Christian Students with a similar group who were raised as atheists. The Calvinists turned out to be 'detail' people, at least when compared with the atheists. This bias to the detail was evident even in those whose faith had lapsed, indicating that whatever is causing it must happen during childhood.Interesting findings - the impact of our culture and our beliefs shapes the ways in which our brains function in terms of attention. This is amounts to further support for at least some of the assertions of the social constructionist model of how we build our understanding of the world.
Then they swapped countries and religions - Roman Catholics in Italy and Jews in Israel. Here the effect was reversed. In these countries the religious were less detail-oriented, and more focussed on the big picture, than the non religious
In the ultimate test of their theory, they teamed up with Shulan Hsieh, at the National Cheng Keng University in Taiwan, one of the least individualistic countries in the world. They found that local Buddhists were more likely to be 'big picture' people than were the local atheists.
Colzato thinks that the different religious cultures are affecting the way their subjects look at the world. Dutch Calvinism is highly individualistic, and so children must (so the theory goes) be rewarded for 'correct' behaviour - for focussing on the local, and ignoring the wider environment.
Catholicism and Judaism, on the other hand, emphasize collective, social responsibility. Children growing up in that environment are learn to pay more attention to the wider picture, and less on individual responsibility.
Buddhism is very different. However, according to Colzato, it emphasizes the physical and social context in which the practitioner lives. Since meditation is not a particular feature of Taiwanese Buddhism, it's unlikely that meditation caused the effects they saw.
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I don't understand how the chicken incident relates specifically to religion? Maybe the presentation was boring, and they noticed the chicken because it wasn't supposed to be in the scene, and it was far more interesting than the presentation. If it has something to do with religion, could you make the actual connection clear?
ReplyDeleteThe chicken had nothing to do with the religion - it was another example of how cultural perspectives shape how we see the world - in that case, the chicken (and the background) was more relevent to the villagers than was the film of planting.
ReplyDeleteIn the studies presented, culture and religion shaped whether people are good at big picture attention or at detail attention - same premise, different example.