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A cultural psychologist explains how culture influences thinking and why multiculturalism is good for the mind. By Russell Schoch One way of telling Kaiping Peng’s story is to say he was born in China, where he was chosen to be in the first generation of Chinese psychologists after the Cultural Revolution and, having excelled, became one of the first Chinese-trained psychologists to teach the subject at Beijing University. He came to the United States and pursued graduate study at the University of Michigan, where he received the first National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to study “culture and cognition.” Following his Ph.D., he was widely recruited and in 1997 came to Berkeley, where he has continued to be one of the leading scholars in the burgeoning field of cultural psychology. All of which is true. And “Western,” because, according to Peng (pronounced “Pong”), it focuses on the individual and ignores the context, the individual’s situation and life history. These, Peng says, form the individual as much as the individual forms the situation. A fuller, more contextual, account would be: Born in Hunan Province in 1962, the son of a college professor, Kaiping Peng wanted to study physics. He applied to Beijing University, and was accepted—not in his chosen field, but in something he had never heard of: psychology. That (decadent, bourgeois) subject had been banned by Chairman Mao and had not been taught in China for 30 years. But, after Mao’s death in 1976, and following a visit the next year from the president of the United States National Science Foundation—a psychologist by the name of Richard Atkinson, who is now president of the University of California—the Chinese leaders decided to reintroduce the study of psychology. Peng was informed that he had been picked to be one of a small group of students who would make up China’s first generation of academic psychologists after the Cultural Revolution. His father, who had been sent to a fishing village to be “re-educated” for two years during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, advised his son to accept. Peng did, and graduated—despite having understood little of what “psychology” might be from the bizarre translations into Chinese of texts and lectures from visiting American psychology professors, including Richard Nisbett from the University of Michigan. Peng was asked to teach psychology at Beijing University, and he did so for five years before coming to the United States on a sabbatical in 1988–89. When the massacre at Tiananmen Square occurred in June 1989, Peng was traveling in Michigan and was unable, for political reasons, to rejoin his wife in Beijing. He looked up his old teacher Professor Nisbett and, after long discussions about what Peng should do, it was decided he should enroll in a Ph.D. program. While he was casting about for a research topic, a tragic event took place at another Big Ten campus, the University of Iowa. A Chinese graduate student there shot and killed his advisor and several others before killing himself. Peng was struck by the profound differences in the ways people from different cultures understood those acts of murder and suicide. He and an American graduate student, Michael Morris (now at Stanford), did a cross-cultural study of “causal attribution,” asking how this varied between American and Chinese people. This was his first published paper, and led him to the study of how cognition varies between cultures, primarily Chinese and American. As Peng himself says, “These historical incidents and accidents changed my life.” And why did he choose to come to this campus? He had been introduced to Berkeley when, as a teenager, he saw his first American film: The Graduate, which features scenes of the Berkeley campus. A second historical accident: the text he used to study English was, for some unknown reason, Fiat Lux, a collection of essays by Berkeley alumni celebrating their time on campus. A more practical reason: with its multicultural (and Asian-American) student body, he felt “comfortable” here, a feeling he didn’t have at other universities. No matter how you tell his story, Kaiping Peng is a leader of a new generation of American cultural psychologists who seek to understand how culture affects cognition. Born in the East, he uses the scientific tools of the West—experiments, control groups, computer simulations, and mathematical analyses—to show how cognition adapts to cultural differences. On campus, he heads the Culture and Cognition Lab in Tolman Hall, where he was interviewed just days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What can cultural psychology tell us about the events of September 11? I’ve been thinking about this, how my life’s work is related to such current events. First of all, I think it’s time for us to pay more attention to culture and cultural differences, the impacts of culture on human behavior. For a very long time, we’ve talked about people’s behavior as driven by personalities or psychopathological problems—it’s very easy for us to perceive these people to be crazy, insane: Suicide bombers must be crazy. But we have to understand that these people could fly airplanes. Most of them were probably quite rational and logical. The reasons they did what are called crazy acts, I believe, has something to do with what they believed in, the communities they live in, and their religious beliefs. I’m not saying that their religion itself created the problems. What I’m saying is that, to their way of thinking, certain behaviors are supported by their community. In order to get the approval of their community, they believe they have to do something that we may think is crazy. But people don’t live by themselves; they live in communities. We have to study that; we have to understand those communities, those cultures, those religions. We cannot just apply our own beliefs, our own understandings, to people from other cultural groups. That’s one thought. A second is that the American media and the general public still have a very analytical approach to understanding the tragic events of September 11. The immediate reaction was: what caused this? It’s probably a lack of airport security, or a problem of controlling our borders. The majority never thought of the contextual question: Why? Why did this happen? President Bush gave a very strong speech after the events, but I don’t think he addressed the broader question. He said that freedom had been attacked. My understanding is that those people who attacked the United States did so not because of the freedom we enjoy, but probably because of the policies that we’ve been conducting. To prevent such tragedies from occurring, perhaps it’s time to look less at the technological solutions—weapons and missile defense systems—and more at more subtle and psychological issues. We need to develop the diplomacies and policies and relationships and psychological mechanisms that can better deal with conflicts throughout the world and deal with people from different cultures than our own. In short, to take a more contextual view, which is more Eastern, and less Western and analytical. This brings up one of your major findings, that people in different cultures—in China and America, in your research—have different ways of thinking, that culture affects cognition. I thought that cognition—our ability to reason and to apply logic—was supposed to be universal. But we don’t only respond to the physical environment. We also respond to the psychological environment, in interaction with other people, in our communities, our schools—in all the social environments developed by people around the world; and those systems might be fundamentally different. Therefore, different people in different societies will develop cognitive mechanisms that are different from people in other places, each with their own social environments. And these will bring forth differing understandings and uses of high-level cognition, including understanding of causality and intentionality, responsibility, probability judgments, and so on. How, then, can people from different cultures—you and me, for example—sit down and talk and understand each other? Certain things are definitely shared across cultures. When humans develop one kind of thinking, other sides are always there, too. Men are masculine but also have a feminine side; and women are feminine, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any masculine characteristics. Cognition is like that. Psychology is like that. Nothing is either this or that; it’s always this…and another side. But perhaps one way of thinking is much more salient than the other, more socially acceptable, more culturally meaningful, more approved. Nevertheless, the other side is always there. Two ways of thinking have been emphasized in your work, the Chinese and American. How do they differ? I would say that Chinese thinking has the characteristics of what I call “dialectical” thinking. I don’t mean Hegelian dialecticalism; that’s a Western, linear term. What I mean by dialectical is that Chinese think the best way to understand the world is to look at the changing concepts, to look at things in action; whereas Americans tend to think “analytically,” to look at things in isolation, or when they’re stable. Let me give you an example. When a Chinese person looks at a student, he doesn’t see the student only as he or she is right now; they look at what happened to the student before, and at what might happen in the future; they look at where the student comes from, what connections the student has. So they basically put the student into a context, making connections and relationships with many things. A concrete example would be reactions to the story of Gang Lu, the distraught Chinese student in Iowa City who murdered several people and then killed himself. Americans considered him to be crazy, a time bomb ready to go off. When they heard that my wife and I knew him—that he actually dated my wife’s roommate—they said the roommate was lucky she wasn’t killed, because he could have gone crazy at any time. That’s just the way he was. But I believed that it was the situation, the context, that brought about his behavior. If he had remained in China, he would have been different; if he had been married, he would have been changed. I believe that the situation changes an individual’s behavior. And you’re saying that this is a natural way for Chinese to think? I think it’s the natural way for most people in China to deal with various kinds of information. They seek connections, look for the other side, notice the contextual forces that might be operating. Whereas Americans have a tendency to look at objects by themselves, to isolate the objects, cut off all their connections. Where do these natural tendencies come from? The simple answer is that each comes from experience, including education, socialization with family and friends, and probably also from learning one’s traditions and history. That’s at an individual level. At a cultural level, I think it comes from philosophy, beliefs, and the history and heritage of the culture. As Chinese grow up, they learn Chinese culture; the public representations of their culture are quite dialectical. For Americans, their culture is more analytical, going back to the Greeks and Aristotle. For Chinese, it goes back to Taoism. A recent article about your work was called “White men can’t contextualize.” Is that true? No! That’s a catchy title, but a more accurate one would be something like, “White men don’t naturally contextualize because their culture doesn’t encourage contextualization.” It’s not a case of ability. The same is true of Chinese. It’s not that the Chinese cannot think analytically. Of course they can! Look at all the Chinese-American scientists, and the high school and college students who do so well in math and science. It’s just that in certain domains and certain environments—in more personal spheres of life—they don’t feel comfortable or correct reacting in that way. And that’s the importance of culture, a sign of how culture influences thinking. You’ve made the fascinating observation that, even in adults, cognition can be malleable. Are you an example of that? I do think so, to a certain degree. For instance, when I give a talk to a Western audience, I unconsciously try to think and talk in a very Western way. I will say what I think is true and try to discount possible alternative explanations. And I will basically try to falsify other people’s positions and to criticize them—which I find very difficult to do!—and try to say that what I found, or what I did, is the best, the most plausible explanation, and should be accepted by the audience. How would you speak to a Chinese audience? Then I am always trying to be dialectical, holistic, to make my research findings insignificant in comparison with others’. I try to be very, very inclusive: “Yes, this other researcher said my findings might not necessarily be right; I think he may be correct on many points, and perhaps I may be right on certain other points.” Do you ever get dizzy going back and forth between these ways of thinking and talking? No. This is a very good thing about human malleability. These ways of thinking are built into your mind, and there’s no dizziness in going back and forth. Think of it in this way: When you talk to your colleagues, you talk in a certain way; when you talk to your children, you’re different—much more gentle and kind, your voice and your demeanor change. You don’t even notice it because it’s so natural and unconscious. Should Americans think more like Chinese, be more dialectical? I think so. Because we in America are too analytical, too linear, we pay too much attention to individual identity, individual properties, and we’re too much focused on the immediate cause of an incident or an event, and overlook the big picture. So, yes, Americans could learn from dialectical thinking, because doing only one kind of thinking is not rational. The other side of this is that Chinese should have more Western thinking. Because if you’re too dialectical, you run the risk of accepting everything at face value: “Yes, you’re right, and you’re right, too.” But not everything is right! Sometimes you do have to make a judgment about what is more true. Also, in human judgments, you cannot always say, “It’s the context.” What about individual responsibilities? Not all people in certain groups are crazy; but some might be. I believe that Chinese are fundamentally too dialectical: “Oh, these guys are not very good; but they’re not all bad.” If you don’t stand up for what might be more true, then you are at the mercy of dictators. So each system could benefit from the other? That’s my position. Each should have more of the other. And that brings up the subject of diversity. We
In answer to conservative claims about diversity, I say, Yes, there are differences. But that doesn’t mean that your ways of thinking are better than mine, or mine are better than yours. Some conservatives put value judgments on our differences. I don’t think either the right or the left is correct. I think we really need to learn from cultural differences. The real meaning of diversity is to appreciate our differences. That’s multiculturalism? Yes. That’s what multiculturalism is all about. There’s no evidence for any racial differences or biological differences—it’s false science to claim so. What we end up with is that diversity is psychological difference. People have different ways of behaving and different ways of thinking, of approaching issues. Those are the differences. Do you see different epistemologies on campus, some dialectical and some analytical? That’s an interesting question, but an empirical one. I wouldn’t want to give a categorical response. We did do some studies comparing bicultural Asians and monocultural Asians. What we have found so far is that, in many cognitive tasks, many Asian Americans are actually quite “American.” They are not as dialectical as I expected. But there are generation differences. First-generation students who come here with strong cultural influences from their parents and home countries respond very much like Asians in Asia. But the second and third generations are very American. But on issues that are related to their identities—to their families and interpersonal relationships—you find that they still have a strong Asian influence. So on those issues—who you are, how you deal with your parents, how to make friends, to have families and raise children—there are still cultural differences that are quite fundamental. Once they can speak the language— Exactly. Once they speak like an American, they can think like one. In doing this culture-cognition research, I have the sense that, while bicultural people may have conflicts, on the other hand they may have better ways of thinking: more complex, more multidimensional. When an issue comes up, they don’t just use one way of understanding, they can look at it from differing perspectives. And I do believe that if you attempt to synthesize different ways of thinking, you can become a better person, cognitively. That’s the lesson I teach my students—and my own children. “Multiculturalism” is not just to make everybody happy. Yes, there are elements of that, but you can also become a better person by being open to different cultures, because each culture has its own strengths and weaknesses. There’s a Chinese saying: If you are inside a mountain, you cannot see the mountain. Cultural experience is very much like that. If you have a monoculture, just one set of cultural experiences, then you don’t even know your own culture. People can tell you a lot about your culture, but you can’t really see the whole picture, only one side. But if you are interacting with people from different cultures, then you can know your own culture better. In the meantime, you also will know other cultures better, too. That’s my theory of multiculturalism: It can make everybody better. Have you studied this? I’m beginning to study the cognitive elements of biculturalism. For example, how much cognitive elements like reasoning and understanding affect cultural understandings. One topic I’m working on is, how do people from two different cultures understand each other’s attitudes and desires? How do they make sense of the other’s traits and characteristics? What are you finding? What we are finding is that people’s judgments of the other’s intentions are different in different cultures. For example, the downing of the U.S. spy plane last April off the South China coast. When they talked about the cause of this incident, Americans focused on the immediate cause: Why did this plane go down? To Americans, it was obvious: We had a big plane, and the Chinese had a small jet, which was much more mobile, so it must be their fault for getting too close to the American plane. To the Chinese, their causal understanding is always more dialectical, more holistic. So they don’t look at this one specific incident. They said, “It doesn’t matter what immediately caused this”—which airplane—“because it’s both parties’ fault.” What matters is how this thing started. “You flew to my country, so you started the whole thing.” This sounds like the differing opinions of what happened in the United States on September 11. Very much so. Different cultures have different ways of understanding events. What cultural psychology tries to do is to help different cultures understand each other, in ways that are not only ideological and political, but also psychological and cultural. I think these are important additions to our understanding.  Return to Top |
 Photos by Steve Labadessa
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