Happiness: A Fortune-Telling Divide
While American hipsters devour anime films, their Japanese counterparts are busy perfecting their hip-hop moves. But despite all the cultural cross-pollination, Easterners and Westerners still differ when it comes to predicting how much happiness the future will bring.
Studies show that humans are inept forecasters of our own feelings. We routinely expect a major event—such as a promotion—to lift our spirits more than it actually does. This is because we tend to focus solely on the glorious moment, disregarding mundane or negative circumstances that will affect how we feel as life continues to unfold.
But this finding didn't resonate with Kent Lam, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong as a child. He knew that where Westerners see "parts," Easterners see "wholes." When asked to describe an aquarium, for example, Japanese people are more likely to mention background elements such as seaweed and rocks, while Americans tend to hone in on the tank's centerpiece: the biggest fish.
Indeed, Lam's cross-cultural studies indicate that East Asians are less likely to show the focusing effect and thus make less extreme (though not necessarily more accurate) predictions about how they'll feel in the future. In one experiment, Lam and his coauthors forced Euro-Canadian subjects to "de-focus" on an upcoming trip or a party, for example, by having them list everything else (exams, a doctor's appointment) that would be going on in their lives at the same time. Sure enough, the subjects' mood predictions were more moderate. "We basically turned them into Asians," Lam says.
But even for those who naturally see the big picture, predicting emotions is difficult, Lam says: "We're not saying all Asians can tell the future and Westerners are a simple people who can't focus on more than one thing." And because the pursuit of happiness itself is a rather Western—even American—concept, Easterners may care somewhat less whether something will leave them elated or not. Says Lam: "There is some research showing that East Asians are less motivated to seek happiness. They may make decisions not according to how happy something will make them, but according to what's normal or good for the group."