CULTURED MINDS
An Investigation of How Culture Affects Decision Making
LANGUAGE
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see (Kay & Kempton,1984) for a review) suggests that language plays a role in shaping how and what people think. Grammar and vocabulary of each languages provides a channel which people use to express themselves, but languages have their limitations in expressing the full range of human experience. Thus, language can arguably impose limitations/create tendencies for ways people process and convey information: “By learning to use a language in a certain way, we may also learn to use our mind in a certain way” (Kashima, Kashima & Kidd). They also provide research suggesting that some of these differences such as ‘pronoun drop’ (Kashima & Kashima, 1997) have important and observable behavioural consequences.
(Kashima, Kashima & Kidd) also note that “geographical distributions of linguistic practices and cognitive styles (see below ‘Thinking Styles’) appear to overlap.” More contextualising linguistic practices and holistic processing styles are found in East Asia, whereas decontextualising languages and an analytic processing style are more common in Western Europe.
Language & Time Perception
Time perception is also linked to language, although it remains an open question whether language reflects or dictates how time is perceived across cultures. For example, different ways of expressing the future: English speakers would say ‘I will go to a concert tonight’ whereas Chinese speakers would say 我去听演出 （I go listen concert); the Chinese speakers can naturally omit the future tense whereas English speakers cannot. These differences, compounded over a lifetime of language usage, apparently have observable behavioural consequences on areas such as savings rate and obesity (Chen, 2013).