I finished a book a few months ago, The Geography of Thought. Chinese people see and report things differently than Westerners. E.g. a painting or an aquarium. The Chinese report details while westerners report the main subject. After lots of experiments and analysis they narrowed it down to mostly what language the subjects learned and what language they learned first if more than one.
From memory:
Western language and culture focuses on nouns, classifications, logic.
Chinese focuses on verbs, interactions, harmony.
Mothers playing with children do so differently In China vs the west.
IMO 50,000 years apart is enough time for genetics to vary.
https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356 A “landmark book” (Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association) by one of the world's preeminent psychologists that proves human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture.
Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong?
The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that people actually think about—and even see—the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China.
As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.
