Seeing the other guy’s viewpoint

The saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes does not, of course, have anything to do with pedestrian activities, but with the need to understand how the world looks to another person. According to the results of a new study from the University of Chicago, Americans may be less adept at this kind of understanding than Chinese people.

The study looked at the behavior of 40 students from the university, 20 from China who were native Mandarin speakers and 20 non-Asian students from the US who were native English speakers. The students were paired up, both students in each pair from the same cultural group, and given a task to complete that involved moving pieces around in a grid of squares. One student in each pair directed the other how to proceed; the worker could see all the pieces but the director could not, and the worker could tell what the director could and couldn’t see.

The Chinese students were much better at quickly making the correct moves, taking into account the fact that the director couldn’t see all the pieces. This may indicate that the individualist and independent mindset of the US doesn’t prepare us as well for seeing things from another person’s perspective as the more interdependent and collectivist tendencies of Chinese culture. This article from Science Daily has more details.

The Science Daily article mentions that due to the ambiguity involved in interpreting words and actions, communication can be difficult unless all parties understand each other’s frame of reference. I can certainly agree with that. Sometimes when I see how people, myself included, so easily misinterpret another’s motivation or intentions, I’m amazed that people can communicate with each other at all. This is an interesting look at cultural influences on the problem, but it would be even more interesting to see followup work that looks at cases where neither person has a clear view of the other person’s gaps in knowledge, which is quite often the situation in real life.