CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS / Objective facts vs emotional states

Kate Elwood Special to The Daily Yomiuri

I once had a rather disconcerting experience. I had been asked to serve as a judge of an English speech contest along with some other language educators. We were given evaluation sheets that required us to rank the speaker on a variety of aspects and then give a rank for total impression and a few comments. The assessment was to be done without consultation with the others, and indeed there was neither the time nor the privacy to do so had we wished to anyway. After each speech we had a short interval in which to make our appraisals after which the cards were passed to an assistant and we turned our attention to the next speaker.

Somewhere in the middle of the speeches as we handed in our score cards for one speaker, I accidentally caught a glimpse of the evaluation of the judge sitting next to me, a Japanese man. To my astonishment, as far as I could tell from my short and inadvertent glance, his scorings and my own were virtually direct opposites. The ranking instructions were clear so it seemed unlikely that it was simply a matter of him, or me, penciling in a "1" for top marks when in fact it was the lowest ranking. I didn't know the judge well but I believed him to be conscientious and competent. I had to conclude that even though we were evaluating speakers item by item, the grounds on which we judged each point were literally poles apart.

The research of applied linguists Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Zoltan Dornyei points to a similar type of phenomenon. They showed a videotape with 20 scenarios to English learners and teachers in Hungary and the United States. Eight scenarios ended with sentences that were grammatical but socioculturally inappropriate, another eight with sentences that were socioculturally appropriate but ungrammatical, and there were four more that were both socioculturally appropriate and grammatical. The students and teachers were asked "Was the last part of each scenario appropriate/correct?" and then asked to rank how bad the problem was (if a problem had been identified) from "Not bad at all" to "Very bad" with six possible rankings.

The English learners in the United States recognized more sociocultural errors than grammatical ones, but for the Hungarian students the reverse was true. The teachers in both countries generally spotted both types of errors. More interestingly, the students and teachers in the United States rated the severity of sociocultural errors higher than for grammatical errors, while the ranking of the Hungarian students and teachers was almost precisely converse. Clearly, the way of thinking regarding types of errors was quite different.

Recently, I read an interesting piece of research about Japanese and American differences which suggests that the divergences may be even deeper and more widespread. Hiroshi Azuma, a cultural psychologist, presented more than 100 Japanese students and a comparable number of U.S. students with basic scenarios in which a person had committed a transgression, for example, "Student D purposely injured Teacher E." The students were then shown a list of 14 questions and asked which of the questions they needed to get answers to so as to form a moral judgment regarding the wrongdoer, and to rank the questions in order of importance.

For the U.S. students, the top three questions related to how badly injured the teacher was, whether it was the first time for the student to do something like that, and the students' age. On the other hand, the Japanese students considered how the student feels now, how the student felt at the time of the misconduct, and the student's personality to be the most essential information. Azuma notes that the U.S. students demonstrated a preference for objective facts while the Japanese students were more concerned with emotional states. Parallel results were found for the other scenarios.

In addition, the process of reaching a moral judgment was also different between the two groups. Azuma had the students make a preliminary decision regarding the offender on the basis of the core story, and then revise their assessment each time they received a further piece of information. The answers to the questions varied so that sometimes the extra information suggested there were extenuating circumstances, while at other times the facts painted the malefactor in a harsher light.

Azuma found that the Japanese students began with a more moderate judgment, with the assumption that there might be reasons behind the action that at least partially justified or explained the unacceptable behavior. If subsequent particulars of the case required it, they then became severer in their verdict. Conversely, the U.S. students tended to start out with a pretty tough assessment which they modified when provided with mitigating details.

On top of this, the ultimate judgments reflected different orientations toward transgressions related to aggression or betrayal. The Japanese students assessed betrayals more sternly, whereas the U.S. students considered aggression more inexcusable. Azuma suggests that the Americans judged offenses against general norms as more indefensible, compared to the Japanese who evaluated wrongdoing in interpersonal relationships more strictly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous 19th-century American essayist, philosopher and poet, wrote, "It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self." I grew up in a town adjacent to where Emerson lived outside of Boston and I have great respect for him, yet I wonder if Japanese people would agree as readily as I did when I first read this statement. After living more than half my life outside my native country, the words of the contemporary writer Rita Mae Brown seem more relevant to my occasional cultural bungles: "Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment."

Elwood is a professor of English at Waseda University's School of Commerce. She is the author of "Getting Along with the Japanese" (Ask, 2001).