[Researchers] tested the bias of 72 Dutch participants towards either global or local processing. … Life-long atheists showed the strongest bias for the big picture, followed by the Liberal Calvinists, and then the Conservative Calvinists and the former Conservative Calvinists turned atheist. The latter two groups performed similarly suggesting that more than seven years without religious practice wasn’t enough to remove the effects of the religion on a person’s attentional mindset. …
Face processing is an area where differences have been found, but appear to be the reverse of the Western "prominent salient objects" vs Eastern "examination of the whole scape" trend:
"Research has indicated that when viewing faces, East Asians focus on the central region of faces while Westerners look more broadly, focusing on both the eyes and mouth."
This still seems to be binned as Eastern holistic vs Western analytical though, for reasons I'm not sure of.
(It seems that this Eastern face processing strategy is suboptimal though:
"Eastern observers use a culture-specific decoding strategy that is inadequate to reliably distinguish universal facial expressions of fear and disgust. Rather than distributing their fixations evenly across the face as Westerners do, Eastern observers persistently fixate the eye region.")
This sounds almost opposite what I would have expected. According to Nisbett (Geography of Thought), "holistic" East Asian thinking is context-dependent and dialectic, emphasizing hierarchy, harmony, collective action, and parochialism. In contrast, "analytic" Western thinking is rule-based and deductive, emphasizing formal equality, distinctiveness, individual action, and universal rules. If he is right, then it is Western thinking that is far and Eastern thinking that is near according to your summary.
Regarding law, for example, Nisbett presents examples showing law applied on a case-by-case basic in Asia (near) in contrast to Western-style reliance on abstract rules (far) and with Continental Europe falling somewhere in between. He find similar differences in medical approaches, language (topic vs. subject prominence), as well as teaching and parenting methods.
Face processing is an area where differences have been found, but appear to be the reverse of the Western "prominent salient objects" vs Eastern "examination of the whole scape" trend:
http://www.psychologicalsci...
"Research has indicated that when viewing faces, East Asians focus on the central region of faces while Westerners look more broadly, focusing on both the eyes and mouth."
This still seems to be binned as Eastern holistic vs Western analytical though, for reasons I'm not sure of.
(It seems that this Eastern face processing strategy is suboptimal though:
http://www.cell.com/current...
"Eastern observers use a culture-specific decoding strategy that is inadequate to reliably distinguish universal facial expressions of fear and disgust. Rather than distributing their fixations evenly across the face as Westerners do, Eastern observers persistently fixate the eye region.")
This sounds almost opposite what I would have expected. According to Nisbett (Geography of Thought), "holistic" East Asian thinking is context-dependent and dialectic, emphasizing hierarchy, harmony, collective action, and parochialism. In contrast, "analytic" Western thinking is rule-based and deductive, emphasizing formal equality, distinctiveness, individual action, and universal rules. If he is right, then it is Western thinking that is far and Eastern thinking that is near according to your summary.
Regarding law, for example, Nisbett presents examples showing law applied on a case-by-case basic in Asia (near) in contrast to Western-style reliance on abstract rules (far) and with Continental Europe falling somewhere in between. He find similar differences in medical approaches, language (topic vs. subject prominence), as well as teaching and parenting methods.