"When presented with a plausible proposition, both Chinese and Americans assented to it,
but when participants were presented with both the plausible proposition and a less plausible
proposition that appeared inconsistent with each other, Chinese and Americans responded in
utterly different ways. Chinese became less confident about the plausible proposition, but
Americans became even more convinced of the correctness of the plausible proposition! The
Americans’ behavior is hard to justify on normative grounds, but is understandable given
Western insistence that a proposition must be true or false. Westerners’ arguments against the
weaker proposition would serve to strengthen belief in the more plausible proposition. In still a
third condition, participants were given only the less plausible proposition and asked to evaluate
it. Again, Americans and Chinese judged the proposition as equally likely to be true. When
beliefs about the less plausible proposition in this condition were compared with those in the
two-proposition condition, it was found that Americans’ belief in the less plausible proposition
were unaffected by seeing the more plausible proposition. But Chinese participants actually
increased their belief in the less plausible proposition when they saw it contradicted by the more
plausible proposition! They ended up believing that both propositions were equally plausible, a
tendency that is hard to defend on normative grounds. This remarkable tendency can be
understood as the result of Chinese desire to seek the “Middle Way” and to find the truth in
apparently contradictory propositions."
- Richard E. Nisbett, Ara Norenzayan, "Culture and cognition".
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