Americans wear black for mourning (哀悼) while Chinese wear white. Westerners
think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese
civilization has often shown such polarities (对立)with the West, as though each stands
at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University of California,
Berkeley, a psychologist, has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and
American cultures—polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover
truth.
His findings go far toward explaining why
American cultures seem to be aggressive and Chinese cultures so passive, when
compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the way for the
peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in basic ways. The
Chinese could learn much from Western methods for determining scientific truth,
said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing Scholar, who is now a UC Berkley assistant
professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from the Chinese
tolerance for accepting contradictions in social and personal life, he said.
"Americans have a terrible need to
find out who is right in an argument," said Peng. "The problem is
that at the interpersonal level you really don't need to find the truth, or
maybe there isn't any." Chinese people, said Peng, are far more content to
think that both sides have advantages and disadvantages, because they have a
whole awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming
of the individual than do Americans, he added.
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