Culture and the science of attention
Marie Gervais, PhD., Global Leadership Associates Inc. www.global-leadership.ca mgervais@global-leadership.ca
Babies pay attention to everything. But by the time they are six or seven years old, their surrounding culture has taught them to pay attention to some things and ignore others. This selection process is intimately connected to what the culture values. Individuals growing up in any given cultural context will be emotionally rewarded by their own brains when they show evidence of culturally approved foci of attention. Ketay, Aron and Heddent (2009) conducted research on how different cultures showed preferences in thinking tasks. They found that people growing up in Western cultures tended to be good at analytic processing and to prefer independent contexts. Those growing up in East Asian cultures excelled in holistic processing and preferred interdependent tasks.
In 2010, Beth Azar wrote an article for the journal Monitor on Psychology which is nicely summarized in Daniel Lende’s blog Cultural Neuroscience – Culture and the Brain. Azar’s research demonstrated that the brain compensates for tasks we are not typically exposed to in our daily cultural contexts. It does this by turning up the attention circuits so we can put the necessary effort into learning the required task.
Even more interestingly, one of Tuft’s university psychology researchers, Nalini Ambady, discovered that when the brain notices something that is culturally valued, it rewards itself by activating the reward circuitry and related hormones. This is applicable in the collectivist/individualist preferences of various cultural groups. Generally speaking, whereas Western cultures value dominance, Eastern cultures value submissiveness. A Western individual seeing an image of someone in a dominant position next to someone in a submissive position will have a brain flooded with rewarding feelings when viewing the dominant-looking image. Conversely, an Eastern person will get the same rewarding feelings when viewing the submissive-looking image.
The brain activity was the same in all varieties of ethnic affiliations for the subjects in these research projects. The only area that consistently showed differences was the degree of collectivist or individualistic valuing. Individuals from collectivist cultures and from individualistic cultures showed the same kinds of brain behaviors when assessing that which was culturally valued only in the domain of collectivism/individualism. There was plenty of individual variation that could not be categorized across cultures and there were, of course, developmental similarities across all groups given that we share the same human heritage and this accounts for much of our activity.
The point of this kind of research on culture and attention is not that we should categorize people and expect them to behave within cultural norms – as if we could understand others so simplistically! Rather the point is that we may be missing out on things that we have culturally learned to ignore or undervalue, or we may miss them entirely. When we start from the premise that we are not maybe missing something, but we are definitely missing something because we are limited by our own culturally reinforced brains – there is less likelihood that we will insist on the “rightness” of our perspective. This could have revolutionary implications for education, for training and development, and for learning at work. Becoming aware of both the limitations and the gifts that our particular cultural upbringing has bestowed upon us, and the way our brain rewards us for staying with “what we know”, can free us to first notice and then learn different ways of paying attention, from the people around us.
References:
Azar, Beth. (2010). Your brain on culture. Monitor on Psychology. November 41(10) print version page 44. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/11/neuroscience.aspx. Correct on September 16, 2011.
Lende, Daniel. (2010). Cultural neuroscience – Culture and the brain. PlosBlogs: Diverse Perspectives on Science and Medicine. Posted November 26, 2010. Correct on September 16, 2011.
Davidson, Cathy N. (2011). Now you see it: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live and work and learn. Toronto: Penguin Group, Pearson Canada.
