The feelings of the Chinese People
Yesterday I gave a talk and then listened to a talk by Kaiping Peng from Berkeley, whose work I’ve always found fascinating. One aspect that struck me this time as very interesting is illustrated in this picture, from his presentation. In one task, they asked Americans and Chinese whether the group of fish were happy or not. He reported that the Americans often responded by asking which fish they were talking about, while Chinese subjects just answered the question.
It struck me because I’ve always thought it really strange when government officials talk about something or other as offending the Chinese people. My reaction is the same as the typical American in Peng’s study—there are a lot of Chinese people, which ones are you talking about?
This may come down to the American belief that people are pretty different from each other, whether in fact that’s true, and perhaps a Chinese view that it is reasonable to talk about collectively held emotions.
November 14th, 2003 at 8:15 am
Were the fish purposefully chosen as the stimuli?
What exactly did he ask the participants?
If he simply asked participants “Are the fish happy or not?”, the group/individual confusion in the could only occur with nouns that had the same singular and plural form (in English language). Did the Chinese sample have the same opportunity for confusion, or are the single and plural form of ‘fish’ more distinct in Chinese?
There are only a few words i can think of where this would work: fish, deer, buffalo, sheep…
November 14th, 2003 at 10:06 pm
I don’t remember exactly. In the talk, he said he chose fish because everybody likes fish. I think your points about singular and plural are well taken, although you could clearly specify the group in both cases. What I find interesting is that even if the referent is clear, it still seems like a really odd question to me, and apparently it doesn’t to Chinese speakers.
November 24th, 2003 at 8:42 pm
Actually I think it has something to do with the culture. As working in the 1st grade, I find that teachers here always encourage students to ask questions. Even she just mentioned the obvious answer to the question, the teacher would say,” it’s a good question.” But although Chinese teachers also encourage students to ask questions these days, if the student asks a question that the teacher just talked about, he will be regarded as impolite and absent-minded. What’s more, testers and teachers are considered to be the authority in our society, at least to testees and students. That’s why they do not tend to doubt and question them. For example, when I was teaching in Shanghai, sometimes I made a mistake on purpose, but no students pointed out that I was wrong until I asked them several times. So day after day, we don’t ask questions as often as Americans do. Just like me, I don’t ask questions as often as American students, either. It’s almost a kind of learning habit.
By the way, which age group are those people that Professor Peng tested? I think it also matters a lot.