East Asian countries are the most likely to embrace contradiction and change, according to a study published in . Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This study also suggests that this mindset is not simply another form of collectivism, but reflects a unique cultural mindset.
People think differently about themselves and the world around them. Some people prefer clear answers and consistency, while others are comfortable holding seemingly opposing ideas at the same time, expecting change, and seeing events as deeply interconnected. Psychologists call this latter style dialectical thinking, and it has long been associated with East Asian philosophical traditions such as Confucianism and Buddhism. However, to date, no study has systematically compared the level of dialectical thinking across countries using all available evidence.
The researchers wanted to determine whether countries could be reliably compared on the basis of this cultural mindset, and whether the dialectical mindset had changed over time. They also sought to understand whether it should be explained by long-standing cultural and historical influences or by more recent social changes such as globalization.
A research team led by Julie Spencer Rogers at the California Institute of Technology combined data from 139 studies involving 23,629 participants from 28 countries. Rather than recruiting new participants, the research team conducted a large-scale meta-analysis of previous studies using the Dialectical Self Scale, a questionnaire that measures how strongly people perceive themselves to be contradictory, flexible, and constantly changing. The researchers then created a Dialectical Self-Index and compared national scores to a variety of cultural, religious, economic, and historical indicators.
The results revealed clear regional patterns. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, and Hong Kong ranked highest in dialectical thinking, while several countries in Latin America and Europe ranked much lower. The researchers also found that countries with strong Buddhist traditions and historic rice-growing cultures tended to score higher on dialectics. In contrast, globalization, economic development, and education showed a weak relationship with this indicator. Perhaps most notably, dialectics was unrelated to collectivism, suggesting that these are distinct cultural concepts, even though they were often grouped together in previous research.
The study also found little evidence that dialectical thinking has changed over the past 20 years. Neither the average age of the participants, nor the proportion of women in the study sample, nor the year in which the data were collected explained differences in dialectical thinking across countries. Rather, cultural background seems to have the strongest influence. The researchers concluded, “Taken together, our findings suggest that dialectics is a deeply rooted, stable, and central cultural idea.”
The authors caution that the findings should not be interpreted as a final ranking of countries. Many countries were represented in only one or a few studies, and most participants were urban university students rather than nationally representative samples. It was also underrepresented in much of the world, including much of Africa and South Asia.
The study, “The Global Dialectical Self: A Meta-Analysis of Country-Level Instruments,” was authored by Julie Spencer Rogers, Isabella Major Siciliano, Wei Yang, Antonio AS Cortijo, Lauren McKenzie, and Kaiping Peng.
