by Adam Alter
American and Vietnamese cultures are very different, and it’s difficult to reconcile conflicting cultural beliefs. You can’t, for example, put your own personal dreams first while also putting your community’s well-being above your own, unless you happen to dream of serving your community. As a result, bicultural people like Andrew Lam are forced to engage in what psychologists call frame switching. According to the theory of frame switching, you can perceive the world either through the frame of one culture or through the frame of the other. This is captured in visual illusions like the Necker Cube, the left-hand illustration below.
The Necker Cube lacks depth cues, so you can see it either as a cube facing downward (the top-right figure) or a cube facing upward (the bottom-right figure), but not both at the same time. The same is true of biculturalism. Although many bicultural people come to feel comfortable in their new cultural home, their minds are forever bifurcated, split between the norms of their original culture and their new culture. All it takes to flip the switch back to the “old country” is a simple reminder of how things used to be.
In a series of experiments, psychologists capitalized on one robust difference that separates Western from Chinese thought: the way each culture explains social events. Suppose, for example, that you see a person driving recklessly through a red traffic light. Westerners are more likely to criticize the person, assuming he generally cares little for the safety of others; in contrast, East Asians (Chinese included) are more likely to believe that the driver has been forced to drive fast because he’s in the midst of an emergency. Perhaps he’s transporting someone to the hospital, or perhaps he’s been summoned to collect a sick child from school. In other words, the person is behaving badly because he’s responding to situational constraints, and not because he’s chronically irresponsible.
In one experiment, the researchers showed bicultural people a series of images that were related to one of the two cultures that constituted their bicultural identity. Westernized students in Hong Kong, who were familiar with both Chinese and Western culture, were shown either images of an American flag, Abraham Lincoln, and Superman (Western primes) or images of a stone monkey, the Great Wall of China, and a Chinese opera singer (Chinese primes). Later the students completed a range of questionnaires designed to detect whether their patterns of thought more strongly reflected Chinese or Western cultural mores. When the bicultural students in Hong Kong read a story about an overweight boy who went out for dinner with his friends and ate a sugary, high-calorie cake, they interpreted the boy’s behavior differently depending on whether they were primed with American or Chinese images. When primed with the American images, they tended to blame the boy, suggesting that he probably had poor self-control, but when primed with Chinese images, they believed the boy was in a difficult situation, and he was probably pressured to eat the cake. Guided by the primes, the students viewed the world through the cultural lens that came to mind most readily.
Multiculturalism: Skimming the Surface of Many Cultures
Not everyone spends time immersed in two different cultures, but plenty of people dip their toes in many cultural environments. With the rise of international travel, the Internet, and globalized consumerism, people are exposed to dozens of cultures without having to emigrate. Some of the consequences of cultural exposure en masse are perhaps unsurprising. When the American TV show Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted in France in 1993, it had a dramatic effect on child-naming practices. Three of the show’s main characters were named Dylan, Brandon, and Brenda, names that were nonexistent in France before 1993. By the mid-1990s, all three names had mushroomed in popularity, and Dylan had become the sixth-most-popular boy’s name in France. Another main character named Kelly had very little influence on naming practices, probably because that name had already grown popular when the American TV show Santa Barbara introduced a character named Kelly to French screens in 1985. Obviously this influx of non-French names (Dylan, Brandon, and Brenda are Welsh and Irish) comes at the expense of French names, which are cast aside in favor of more exotic star-studded alternatives. Indeed, a number of French intellectuals decried the rise of these names, claiming that they were partly responsible for a rapid dilution of French culture at the end of the twentieth century.
Other effects of cultural exposure are more surprising and subtle, and they arise when people begin to learn the meaning of novel cultural concepts. Westerners were once unfamiliar with the Chinese Taoist yin-yang symbol, but it has become a popular feature in new age and surf culture, and almost all of the people who responded to a recent survey I ran with my colleague Virginia Kwan recognized the symbol (shown below). The yin-yang symbol depicts the interconnectedness of opposing forces, like night and day, dark and light, and female and male. It also suggests that these opposing forces are balanced and always changing, so that the sky, for example, will inevitably oscillate between darkness and light as time passes. Westerners were once collectively ignorant about the meaning of the yin-yang, but a growing number of non-Asian Americans recognize that the symbol implies change, balance, and constant movement between opposites.
The Chinese Taoist yin-yang symbol.
Since Americans are now more familiar with the yin-yang symbol, we were curious to see how they responded when they were subtly exposed to the yin-yang while making various judgments. In one experiment, we asked people to imagine they were weather forecasters trying to predict whether it would be sunny or rainy following a string of sunny or rainy days. The bulk of the questionnaire was identical for each of the students taking part, except that half the questionnaires featured a tiny yin-yang symbol at the top of the page, whereas the other half featured a tiny map of the continental United States. (The yin-yang and map symbol were subtly included as part of a stationery company logo, as though the questionnaires had been printed by a company that used one of those symbols as its logo.)
Although few of the students remembered seeing the symbols after completing the questionnaire, their weather predictions varied dramatically depending on whether they were exposed to the yin-yang or the American map. Since the yin-yang symbol implies change and balance, the students who were exposed to it predicted many more changes in the weather than did students who were exposed to the map. The white American students adopted thought patterns that are more typical among Chinese people when they were exposed to the yin-yang symbol. Later, when we looked at weather prediction trends in the United States and China, we found that Chinese forecasters predicted many more changes in weather patterns across the globe than did American forecasters, which suggests that the cultures have different ideas about how much the weather changes.
We found the same pattern when we asked workers in Manhattan’s Wall Street district to complete a stock investment questionnaire. The workers were given a fictional sum of $1,000 to invest across nine stocks. Some of the stocks had clearly appreciated in recent times, experiencing unambiguous gains over the six months preceding the investment decision. Others had performed ambiguously, sometimes appreciating and sometimes depreciating, but overall performing more poorly than the first set of stocks.
Since Americans expect trends to continue, we expected the participants to prefer stocks that had experienced recent gains, except when a yin-yang symbol reminded them that “what goes up must come down.” When we asked, they overwhelmingly preferred the previously appreciating stocks—except when our research assistant arrived wearing a T-shirt that featured a small yin-yang symbol. As in the weather prediction studies, the yin-yang primed them to consider the possibility that the appreciating stocks might experience a change in fortune, so they invested $160 less in those stocks than did participants who were approached by a research assistant wearing a plain white T-shirt. The effect was also stronger the more broadly respondents had traveled, and the more they knew about the meaning of the yin-yang symbol. The simple lesson here is that even Americans who have only lived in one area of the United States ar
e susceptible to cultural influences, because they’re increasingly exposed to the sorts of foreign cultural symbols that their ancestors rarely or never encountered before the advent of globalized entertainment, the Internet, and inexpensive international travel.
Examples of stock charts from the financial investment study. The chart on the left represents an unambiguously appreciating stock, and the chart on the right represents a stock that experienced mixed fortunes.
Culture is a powerful and pervasive ingredient of thought, determining not only how we interpret transient events like weather and stock market changes but also how we experience diseases and personal threats. Cultures are powerful in part because they’re ubiquitous, enveloping us in norms, mores, and ideals from birth to death, and partly because we rarely turn our minds to their influence. While names, symbols, and social interactions soak up some mental energy, we move from one cultural environment to another even as our attention is drawn elsewhere. We can’t help but live in a particular country, interact with a particular group of people, or pursue a particular set of interests, and the experience shapes us until we no longer recognize that our worldview is a combination of these diverse and distinct cultural norms.
In the last three chapters I’ve described how the social world—the world between us—shapes a diverse range of outcomes. Some of these effects have biological origins, from the latent energy released by an audience in chapter 4, to the risk-promoting consequences of testosterone and the mother-child bonding inspired by oxytocin in chapter 5. Others are a matter of experience inspired by cultural habits, which explains why psychiatric illnesses, artistic preferences, and conceptions of honor differed across cultures in this chapter.
Even broader than the world between us is the expansive physical world that surrounds us—a world that contributes to some of the most striking quirks in human thinking and behavior. The physical world—ambient colors, locations, and weather conditions—hides in plain sight precisely because it forms a constant backdrop against which we live our ever-changing lives. Instead of consciously processing the color of every object, the nature of every room, and the temperature as it changes across time, we wisely conserve our limited mental resources for complex tasks that demand focused attention. The next chapter begins with an account of one such cue: a new form of lighting that began as an attempt to beautify an aging city, but ultimately came to address some of the city’s biggest problems.
PART THREE
THE WORLD AROUND US
7.
COLORS
The Policeman’s Blues
At the turn of the millennium, the government in Glasgow, Scotland, appeared to stumble on a remarkable crime prevention strategy. Officials hired a team of Glaswegian contractors to beautify the city by installing a series of blue lights in various prominent locations. In theory blue lights are more attractive and calming than the garish yellow and white lights that illuminate much of the city at night, and indeed the blue lights seemed to cast a soothing, ethereal glow. Months passed and the city’s crime statisticians noticed a striking trend: the locations that were newly bathed in blue experienced a dramatic decline in criminal activity. Just as the West Midlands police force clamped down on crime with billboards depicting human eyes, the blue lights in Glasgow, which mimicked the lights atop police cars, seemed to imply that the police were always watching. The lights were never designed to stem crime, but that’s exactly what they appeared to be doing.
Word of the miraculous constabulary power of blue light traveled quickly. The police force in Nara Prefecture, Japan, installed a series of 152 blue lights at several crime hot spots. The crime rate fell by an impressive 9 percent, but the blue lights had other, unanticipated benefits: the suicide attempts that plagued Japanese train stations and crossings ceased altogether—not a single attempt was reported along the Central and West Japan Railway Company lines between 2006 and 2008. Even littering and garbage disposal seemed to decline in blue-lit areas, and blue lights were hailed as a panacea for several of society’s most stubborn ills. Some enterprising minds even suggested replacing standard lights at gang hangouts with the pinkish lights that dermatologists use to inspect teenage skin for acne. What better way to encourage teen gang members to disperse than to emphasize their flawed complexions?
Amid the jubilation, researchers began to question the link between the blue lights and the range of reported benefits. Some suggested that the blue lights were brighter or attracted more attention than yellow and white lights, which merely displaced crime, suicide attempts, and littering to more dimly lit locations. Though researchers continue to question whether the lights were beneficial because they were blue, or rather because they attracted attention, several rigorous studies have shown that the color blue has remarkable effects on the human body.
In one study, two researchers visited a sawmill in Montreal, Canada. Sawmill workers grade freshly cut pieces of timber and then cut the graded timber into boards for construction projects—exacting tasks that impose high costs when the workers make mistakes. Many sawmills operate through the night, and workers are sometimes forced to alternate between day and night shifts. This schedule wreaks havoc on a worker’s circadian rhythm, the same biological pattern that causes jet lag when people travel from one time zone to another. Seasoned international travelers know how difficult it is to resist the urge to sleep when jet lag takes hold, and that same state of exhaustion causes countless accidents among shift workers. The researchers approached one such group and suggested an inexpensive, novel remedy: exposure to blue-green light. Blue-green light waves are the shortest visible light waves, and they trigger a range of biological functions that regulate circadian rhythm. Natural light is rich in these blue-green short waves, which is why sunlight is an excellent natural cure for jet lag. To test their theory, the researchers purchased a series of special lights that bathed the night-shift workers in a blue-green glow as they worked. When the shift ended the following morning, the workers wore special amber glasses to block out all blue and green light, thereby confusing their bodies into believing that they were working during the day and leaving work at night. The effects were remarkable. By the fourth day of the trial most of the workers felt more alert, as their error rate declined from 5 percent to just 1 percent.
Few people alternate between night shifts and day shifts, but a similar problem is said to affect millions of people across the world: seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or the winter blues. People who suffer from SAD tend to become depressed and listless for long periods during the winter, which also explains in large part why the disorder affects only 1 percent of Floridians but 10 percent of New Hampshirites. Among the many proffered solutions, blue-green light therapy stands alone as perhaps the least intrusive, and sufferers can purchase special lamps and lightbulbs for little more than the cost of a standard desk lamp. The good news is that dozens of researchers have documented the effectiveness of the remedy, which has the same effects as genuine sunshine: diminished depressive symptoms and renewed energy. This research is generally sophisticated and rigorous, but color therapy began as a far less meticulous pursuit.
The Inauspicious History of Color “Science”
Very few people have strong intuitions about quantum physics, brain surgery, and organic chemistry, because those fields are too technical to invite naive theories and misguided insights. They’re protected from uneducated opinions, because physicists, surgeons, and chemists focus on tiny, abstract concepts like quarks, strings, neurons, and molecules. In contrast, the subject matter of color science is vivid and ubiquitous, and even novices have basic theories about the role of colors in human psychology. As pioneering color scientist Kurt Goldstein noted during a speech in the early 1940s, “That colors influence organic life does not need special proof. Looking around at the colorfulness of all living things, one becomes immediately aware of this fact.”
The early science of color therapy was as
unscientific as Goldstein’s claim. One paper in the Bulletin of the Massachusetts Association for Occupational Therapy in 1938 printed as gospel the observations of a single nurse and her attendant at Worcester State Hospital. They claimed that magenta briefly sedated disturbed patients, blue had a similar but longer-lasting effect, and yellow and red stimulated depressed and melancholy patients. The observations were fascinating, but they weren’t supported by rigorous experimental testing.
Then, in the mid-1940s, two army surgeons introduced Auroratone films, a new method of color treatment for depressed and shell-shocked patients. The films featured a combination of ever-changing psychedelic colors and soothing sound tracks—some including songs specially written for the purpose by Bing Crosby. The films mesmerized patients because they were colorful, but probably more so because their viewers belonged to a generation that had only recently discovered television. According to one report, patients stared transfixed as Crosby sang “Going My Way” over a swirling mélange of colors. One twenty-six-year-old patient known as Patient A had been in North Africa and southern Europe during the last few years of World War II. He was injured in December 1944, and recovered at the hospital that first tested the Auroratone method. Before he watched the films, physicians described Patient A as “very confused, agitated, restless, and untidy about his person.” He wept and spoke like a child, and experienced “vivid hallucinations and grandiose delusions.” In October 1945, almost a year after his original injury, two attendants guided the restrained man to a seat in front of the hospital’s Auroratone screen. Along the way, he tried to strike another patient, and the attendants had to use all their strength to keep him restrained. As soon as the film began, Patient A became a different person. He spoke coherently and politely, enjoyed the film in silence, and claimed for the first time that he wanted to go home. When the film ended, only an hour after his earlier violent outbursts, he walked to his room quietly and without restraints. Patient A was joined by Patients B, C, D, E, and F, who were also sedated by the Auroratone films, each claiming that he was calmed by the film’s “pretty colors” when debriefed after the therapy session. Something about the films was working, but no one ever bothered to check whether it was the color palette, the way the colors swirled on the screen, whether the films would have been just as effective in black and white, or even whether the music was the major factor. Eventually Auroratone went the way of so many other faddish therapies and fell out of favor.