Shinobu Kitayama's guest appearances

Shinobu Kitayama

Social Science Bites

Mershon Center for International Studies Guest Speakers 2009 - 2010

ZKM | Karlsruhe /// Veranstaltungen /// Events

Neuroaesthetics Symposium

Stanford Psychology Podcast 

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Eric chats with Shinobu Kitayama, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on cultural differences and similarities in a variety of mental processes such as self, emotion and cognition.In this chat, Eric and Shinobu chat about how previous work in cultural psychology was limited mostly to differences between Westerners and East Asians. Shinobu summarizes work showing potential differences among understudied groups such as people from the Arab zone, Latin America, and South Asia. Finally, Shinobu clarifies that Western independence is not the same as selfishness and shares his own adventurous journey into the field. What was it like arriving in the US and feeling like most psychology findings did not make sense with his Japanese background?JOIN OUR SUBSTACK! Stay up to date with the pod and become part of the ever-growing community :) https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.Links:Shinobu's paperShinobu's websiteEric's websiteEric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsyPodcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodPodcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/Let us know what you think of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

Eric chats with Shinobu Kitayama, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on cultural differences and similarities in a variety of mental processes such as self, emotion and cognition.In this chat, Eric and Shinobu chat about how previous work in cultural psychology was limited mostly to differences between Westerners and East Asians. Shinobu summarizes work showing potential differences among understudied groups such as people from the Arab zone, Latin America, and South Asia. Finally, Shinobu clarifies that Western independence is not the same as selfishness and shares his own adventurous journey into the field. What was it like arriving in the US and feeling like most psychology findings did not make sense with his Japanese background?JOIN OUR SUBSTACK! Stay up to date with the pod and become part of the ever-growing community :) <a href="https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/</a>If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology. Links:Shinobu's <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-32731-005" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paper</a> Shinobu's <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/people/faculty/kitayama.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">website</a> Eric's <a href="https://ericneumann96.wixsite.com/mysite" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">website</a> Eric's Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/EricNeumannPsy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@EricNeumannPsy</a> Podcast Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/StanfordPsyPod" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@StanfordPsyPod</a> Podcast Substack <a href="https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/</a> Let us know what you think of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

98 - Shinobu Kitayama: A Cultural Psychology for the Whole World

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory were “really hot topics” that he found “intellectually interesting” ways of describing human behavior. “But when I came here [to the University of Michigan] and looked at my graduate students, colleagues, and friends, I realized that those ideas are really active elements of their mind in a way they were not to me as Japanese individual.” He continues, “obviously there are many cultural shocks – for example, I felt hesitant in speaking up in graduate seminar, but I got the impression that American friends end up saying a lot of things seemingly without thinking anything. That’s the kind of experience that made me feel that something more profound might be going on in terms of culture and its influence on psychological processes.” His own perch, he explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, helped focus his personal research into comparing people from East Asia, such as Japan, China, and the Philippines, with people in America. His research ranges from simple exercises involving redrawing a line within a box to brain-scanning technology (“culture gets under the skin,” he jokes before adding, “I find neuroscience indispensable”) and examinations of subsistence agriculture. The Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at Michigan since 2011 now runs the Culture &amp; Cognition Lab at the school’s Psychology Department. He starts his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds offering a description of a prominent cultural difference between East Asia and  Anglo-America - the idea of ‘independence’ and ‘interdependence.’ “In some cultures, particularly in Western traditions, ‘self’ is believed to be the independent entity that is composed of internal attributes, maybe your attitudes, maybe your personality traits and aspirations, which guide your behavior. Social relationships come out of those individual preferences. “In many other cultures, the conception of the person is much more social and relational. There’s a fundamental belief that humans are humans because they are connected to formal social relationships.” Kitayama offers some examples of these differences. “Americans tend to believe that what you hear somebody say must be what this person believes. If somebody says ‘yes,’ he must mean yes. But in many countries, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ carry very different meanings, depending on the context.” While someone from, say, the West may realize this on an intellectual level, in practice they often forget and assume a yes, means, well, yes. “We found this fundamental attribution error,” he concludes, “is much less, and often even nonexistent, in East Asian, and particularly Japanese, contexts.” Or take happiness. “Oftentimes, we believe that happiness is happiness. If Americans are happy, it must be in the way that Japanese are happy. We try to challenge this conception to see what people might mean when they claim they are happy. One easy way to do this is to ask people to write down what they mean by happiness, reasons for happiness, conditions in which happiness happens. Core elements of happiness, like elation, relaxation, feeling of excitement, are fairly common between U.S. and Japan.” But what leads to those states are quite different, with Japanese respondents often citing social harmony while Americans cite personal achievement. In the interview, Kitayama touches on why these differences might have arisen, including one idea that the cultivation of mainstay grains across thousands of years helped create the conditions that led to the cultural traits. The Asian staple of rice, for example, requires a more collective effort – “tight social coordination,” as Kitayama puts it -- to raise and harvest. Meanwhile, the Western staple of wheat requires less collaboration. These underlying agrarian requirements for supremely important foodstuffs may in turn, he says, “promote very different ideologies and social structures and institutions which then lay the ground for contemporary culture.” Kitayama has published widely in English and in Japanese and served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies of Behavioral Science at Stanford in 1995 and in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, inducted as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and served as president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2020.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Shinobu Kitayama was studying psychology at Kyoto University, Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attribution Theory were “really hot topics” that he found “intellectually interesting” ways of describing human behavior. “But when I came here [to the University of Michigan] and looked at my graduate students, colleagues, and friends, I realized that those ideas are really active elements of their mind in a way they were not to me as Japanese individual.” He continues, “obviously there are many cultural shocks – for example, I felt hesitant in speaking up in graduate seminar, but I got the impression that American friends end up saying a lot of things seemingly without thinking anything. That’s the kind of experience that made me feel that something more profound might be going on in terms of culture and its influence on psychological processes.” His own perch, he explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, helped focus his personal research into comparing people from East Asia, such as Japan, China, and the Philippines, with people in America. His research ranges from simple exercises involving redrawing a line within a box to brain-scanning technology (“culture gets under the skin,” he jokes before adding, “I find neuroscience indispensable”) and examinations of subsistence agriculture. The <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/people/faculty/kitayama.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at Michigan</a> since 2011 now runs the <a href="https://kitayama.psych.lsa.umich.edu/wp/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Culture &amp; Cognition Lab</a> at the school’s Psychology Department. He starts his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds offering a description of a prominent cultural difference between East Asia and  Anglo-America - the idea of ‘independence’ and ‘interdependence.’ “In some cultures, particularly in Western traditions, ‘self’ is believed to be the independent entity that is composed of internal attributes, maybe your attitudes, maybe your personality traits and aspirations, which guide your behavior. Social relationships come out of those individual preferences. “In many other cultures, the conception of the person is much more social and relational. There’s a fundamental belief that humans are humans because they are connected to formal social relationships.” Kitayama offers some examples of these differences. “Americans tend to believe that what you hear somebody say must be what this person believes. If somebody says ‘yes,’ he must mean yes. But in many countries, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ carry very different meanings, depending on the context.” While someone from, say, the West may realize this on an intellectual level, in practice they often forget and assume a yes, means, well, yes. “We found this fundamental attribution error,” he concludes, “is much less, and often even nonexistent, in East Asian, and particularly Japanese, contexts.” Or take happiness. “Oftentimes, we believe that happiness is happiness. If Americans are happy, it must be in the way that Japanese are happy. We try to challenge this conception to see what people might mean when they claim they are happy. One easy way to do this is to ask people to write down what they mean by happiness, reasons for happiness, conditions in which happiness happens. Core elements of happiness, like elation, relaxation, feeling of excitement, are fairly common between U.S. and Japan.” But what leads to those states are quite different, with Japanese respondents often citing social harmony while Americans cite personal achievement. In the interview, Kitayama touches on why these differences might have arisen, including one idea that the cultivation of mainstay grains across thousands of years helped create the conditions that led to the cultural traits. The Asian staple of rice, for example, requires a more collective effort – “tight social coordination,” as Kitayama puts it -- to raise and harvest. Meanwhile, the Western staple of wheat requires less collaboration. These underlying agrarian requirements for supremely important foodstuffs may in turn, he says, “promote very different ideologies and social structures and institutions which then lay the ground for contemporary culture.” Kitayama has published widely in English and in Japanese and served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies of Behavioral Science at Stanford in 1995 and in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, inducted as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and served as president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2020.

Shinobu Kitayama on Cultural Differences in Psychology

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 22.-24. November 2012 In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen Hertie-Stiftung. Numerous studies conducted under the banner of cultural psychology during  the last two decades have documented substantial cultural variation in  attention and perception. This literature has made three important points.  First, whereas people in Western cultures tend to place a greater emphasis on an object in lieu of its context, those in Eastern cultures tend to be more holistically attentive to both the object and its context and closely attuned to the relationship between the two.  Second, although the origin of this cultural difference is multifaceted,  one potent factor is the culturally dominant mode of the self and social relations.  The object-focused perception and the holistic perception have been traced back, respectively, to an independent or an interdependent form of the self and social relations.  Third, although behavioral evidence is indispensable, neuroscience investigations of culture and perception have presented a strikingly strong promise, beginning to uncover important neural bases of the cultural variation in attention and perception.  In this lecture, I will review evidence pertaining to each of these points and discuss some implications for cultural variations in art forms and art appreciation.  Dr. Shinobu Kitayama is Robert B. Zajonc Professor of Psychology at the  University of Michigan. He also directs the University’s Center for Culture, Mind,  and the Brain. Over the last two decades, he investigated cultural variations  in self and other related psychological processes including cognition, emotion,  and motivation. Most recently, he has started to examine the neural basis of  these cultural variations, with the ultimate goal to better understand the  nature of the mutually constitutive process between cultural beliefs and practices and the human brain. Before Michigan, he taught at Oregon, Kyoto, Stanford, and Chicago.  He was a Fellow, twice, at the Center for Advanced Studies in  Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (1995–1996, 2007–2008). A recent recipient of  a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has been inducted to the American Academy of  Arts and Sciences. His work on culture and self with Hazel Rose Markus  (Psychological Review, 1991) is one of the most frequently cited in the entire field of social and behavioral sciences.

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 22.-24. November 2012 In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen Hertie-Stiftung. Numerous studies conducted under the banner of cultural psychology during the last two decades have documented substantial cultural variation in attention and perception. This literature has made three important points. First, whereas people in Western cultures tend to place a greater emphasis on an object in lieu of its context, those in Eastern cultures tend to be more holistically attentive to both the object and its context and closely attuned to the relationship between the two. Second, although the origin of this cultural difference is multifaceted, one potent factor is the culturally dominant mode of the self and social relations. The object-focused perception and the holistic perception have been traced back, respectively, to an independent or an interdependent form of the self and social relations. Third, although behavioral evidence is indispensable, neuroscience investigations of culture and perception have presented a strikingly strong promise, beginning to uncover important neural bases of the cultural variation in attention and perception. In this lecture, I will review evidence pertaining to each of these points and discuss some implications for cultural variations in art forms and art appreciation. Dr. Shinobu Kitayama is Robert B. Zajonc Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He also directs the University’s Center for Culture, Mind, and the Brain. Over the last two decades, he investigated cultural variations in self and other related psychological processes including cognition, emotion, and motivation. Most recently, he has started to examine the neural basis of these cultural variations, with the ultimate goal to better understand the nature of the mutually constitutive process between cultural beliefs and practices and the human brain. Before Michigan, he taught at Oregon, Kyoto, Stanford, and Chicago. He was a Fellow, twice, at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (1995–1996, 2007–2008). A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has been inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work on culture and self with Hazel Rose Markus (Psychological Review, 1991) is one of the most frequently cited in the entire field of social and behavioral sciences.

Shinobu Kitayama: Cultural Neuroscience of Perception: Implications for Art and Art Appreciation

Ethos of Independence Across Regions in the United States: The Production-Adoption Model of Cultural Change