Chinese Thought Patterns And Its Cultural Roots

“Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind,” by Ethan Watters, is a compelling article that challenges the reader’s perception on culture and cognition. Instead of cognition affecting culture, our culture affects our cognition. It’s interesting to conceptualize, and it makes one have to introspect their culture, beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Why do we do behave the way that we do? Are our thoughts our own? How much of us is influenced by our environment? This effect of culture can be rooted in our childhoods. We are taught societal norms and how to view, categorize, and perceive the world through the lens of the environment surrounding us. A prime example of this comes from the games we played growing up.

Have you thought of someone’s culture as weird? Have you thought that you are completely different from them? If so, what prompts us to make that assumption. Culture is a very good reason for this. So, to what extent does one’s culture inform the way one views others and the world? Culture informs a person on the way others are and the world.

Religion organizes society; it controls our daily life and can be the breaking or making point of a society. The three Philosophies of China consist of Legalism, Daoism, and Confucianism, but only one Philosophy surpasses all others, Confucianism.

2) Beliefs that are so central to a cultural group that they are never questioned are known as:

The Chinese culture and way of thinking is expertly described by characters in The Joy Luck Club. One character, Lindo Jong, scorns the stereotypical American woman of the 1950s when she states “It’s like those ladies you see on American t.v. these days, the ones who are so happy they have washed out a stain so the clothes look better than new.” (Tan, 56) The Chinese are very traditional and conservative in their values and ideas. In The Joy Luck Club, Lindo Jong describes Chinese character as “How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind.” (Tan, 254) “Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.” (Tan, 254) She truly feels that Americans are not capable of thinking in this manner, or, rather, simply do not think in this manner as Chinese people do.

The first concept which I will explore is culture and what this means to different individuals. In simplified terms, culture refers to how we do things and also how we perceive things within a group. Culture is a shared set of assumptions, values, social conventions and perceptions, which are established on concepts of common language and

Religious and political ideas have served as the fundamental foundation to many early civilizations and settlements and Ancient China is no exception. The texts of the Ta Hsüeh and the Chung Yung clearly details some ideas and concepts of early Confucianism in Ancient China. These early Confucian ideas and concepts from the two texts, in many ways reflect the political, intellectual, and social context of ancient China. Although Confucianism is no long as prominent as it was during the times of ancient China, it is important to understand these concepts and how later Chinese Dynasty adopted it. Confucianism has developed and influenced modern China and also other East Asian cultures, customs, and heritages.

However, Chinese culture is more sensitive and interdependent to society. "Culture can be very important in shaping some fundamental aspects of the human mind," said study researcher Crotts & Erdmann (2000), a psychological professor at the University of Michigan. "This study is one example of a demonstration that culture can influence what appears to be a very deep part the human mind, something that happens automatically and continuously." Advantage is more obvious.

Recent theoretical and empirical developments in psychology have brought the field to the point where researchers need to be mindful of the generalizability of Western findings to other cultural contexts (Heine & Norenzayan, 2006). Another shortcoming of psychological research is the majority of most influential research giving focus to comparisons of North Americans and East Asians. It is perhaps logical that North Americans specifically and Westerners more generally have usually served as the point of comparison in these studies, due to the majority of psychological theories did in fact arise from such samples. Nevertheless, this ought not to be the case. Heine and Norenzayan (2006) calls for cultural psychological research to go beyond only comparisons of East Asians nations with Western nations. At present, despite the growth of cross-cultural research, very little is known about the psychological processes of the majority of cultures of the world. Another shortcoming of psychological research is that it has largely been limited to explorations of the extent to which concepts and occurrences that have been developed and identified in the West generalize to non-Western cultures.

For over 2000 years Taoism has been a major influence on China and its culture, but what exactly is Taoism? Taoism is a philosophical religion that has a complex origin and a unique way of perceiving the meaning of life, and to understand this distinct religion it is important for an individual to know about its history, sacred sites, teachings and beliefs, practices, holidays, and presence in the modern world.

Fundamental beliefs surrounding the very idea of culture separate the cross-cultural and sociocultural approach, which may seem to suggest incompatibility. Sociocultural psychological understanding of culture is that it employs a “mutually constitutive” or “cyclic model”. (Eom & Kim, 2014) The idea of culture in the sociocultural model is that culture influences people on a

The people in China are rich in culture just like other Asian countries. Therefore, to be involve with Chinese people in China for business, undertsanding their values and culture are very important. The first important thing to understand about Chinese is their devotion to collectivism. Chinese is trained from very early to consider himself as a dependent segment of a group, which is also called totalitarianism. It is helpful to think of the notion of family in China as a template applied to many networks of relationships that hold the society together. In the Chinese business context, the notion of family is about more than the emotional support and ties of a nuclear family. Family members, for

Every culture has a set of cultural patterns, and it is possible for that culture to not be conscious of their patterns. Cultural patterns are a set of values, beliefs, and norms practiced in one’s culture (Lustig & Koester, 2013.) An example of a cultural pattern is having individualism or collectivism. In a collectivistic society, there is a level of dependency on a group. One is affiliated with a group and they all care for each other, physically and mentally. These groups are tight-knit and there is a strong sense of loyalty (Harms, 2007.) A collectivism culture is where it would be common for extended family members living under one room. For example, if a culture had grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living together. However, in an individualistic culture, members tend to think and act independently.

1. Culture is perceived as a way of thinking that influences the behaviors of a group of people.

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,