scientific study of behavior and mental processes

#Scientific study of behavior and mental processes series

But the Japanese participants were better than the American participants at recalling background information, such as the color of the water.

In a subsequent recall task, both groups of participants were equally likely to remember salient objects, such as the larger fish. Each lasting about 20 seconds, the scenes showed various aquatic creatures, vegetation, and rocks in an underwater setting.

#Scientific study of behavior and mental processes series

Nisbett presented participants from Japan and the United States with a series of animated scenes. In a classic demonstration of cultural differences in thinking styles, Takahiko Masuda and Richard E. Peter Smith and his colleagues write, “Cross-cultural psychologists resemble researchers in most other fields of psychology in that they usually favor research methods that entail quantitative forms of measurement, but they are distinctive in their emphasis on the need to test their theories across a broad range of geographical locations in order to test their universality.” This shift in perspective has given rise to research societies that address questions of cultural variability and universality, such as the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. But in recent decades some researchers have started questioning this approach, arguing that many psychological phenomena are shaped by the individual cultures in which we live. Some would argue that it has been remarkably successful in understanding what drives human behavior and mental processes, which have long been thought to be universal. The academic discipline of psychology was developed largely in North America and Europe.