Chinese-born Cal Professor Kaiping Peng is forcing the world of psychology to accept a stubborn truth: human behavior cannot be understood apart from culture.
By Timothy Beneke
page 1 of 4 [] Kaiping Peng
photo: Saul Bromberger One night in 1991, Kaiping Peng (pronounced Ki-ping Pong), then a first-year graduate student at the University of Michigan, got a call from a friend telling him to turn on the television. A Chinese graduate student at the University of Iowa had just shot and killed six people, including his advisor and the vice president of the university, then killed himself. Peng had known the man when they were both students at Beijing University in China; Peng’s wife’s roommate had dated him. In the days that followed, Peng noticed a striking difference in the ways Americans and Chinese explained the incident. Americans speculated about deep-rooted disturbances in the man’s personality that must have led him to commit the murders. They assumed that he must have had a terrible childhood and suffered abuse. The Chinese focused on the man’s stressful situation as a lonely foreigner with few friends in a strange country. Peng’s American friends commented that his wife must feel relieved that her ex-roommate had not married the man, because he clearly was a walking time bomb; he likely would have murdered her too. Peng, his wife, and his Chinese friends had no such notion—the idea that he was a "time bomb" was totally alien. His wife, in fact, regretted that her former roommate had not married the man. If she had been there to give him the support he needed, she reasoned, he would never have committed such a horrendous act. The Chinese believed that if he’d married the roommate he wouldn’t have become a murderer, while the Americans figured if the couple had married, she’d probably be dead. Intrigued by these differences, Peng and his colleague, Michael Morris, then also a graduate student at Michigan, did a series of studies comparing Chinese and American responses to the Iowa murders, and to an equally heinous murder committed by an American. They consistently found the same difference in cognitive focus: Americans tended to explain behavior in terms of the internal dispositions of the actors, while the Chinese focused on the power of the situation. This marked the beginning of research that has led Peng to his current position as one of the leading scholars in cultural psychology, a new field that promises to transform our understanding of psychology, or at least of psychological research. Much research that American psychologists have claimed is about "human social behavior," or "human personality" is likely to be understood as being about American, or even more pointedly, Euro-American culture. Instead, cultural psychology tries to place psychological findings in a multicultural context. It argues that human behavior cannot be understood apart from the subjective meanings that inform our beliefs, desires, and emotions, and that it is an open question whether any psychological processes or features are universal. Rather, human behavior and the workings of the human mind are almost always situated among cultural meanings. As Joseph Campos, a professor of child psychology at Cal puts it: "The whole field of psychology needs a conceptual and methodological shakeup in order to take account of subjective meaning. To do this we have to understand culture, because meaning is always influenced by culture." Born in 1962, Kaiping Peng grew up in Hunan Province in south central China. He was among the first generation of psychology majors after the field reemerged after a thirty-year banishment under Mao. Peng went on to do graduate work and became a lecturer in psychology at Beijing University, with a research focus in clinical psychology. In the spring of 1989, he came to the University of Michigan as part of a scholar exchange program. Like most scholars in China, he had been highly critical of the Chinese government’s actions in dealing with the students’ Pro-Democracy Movement. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on June 4, 1989, and martial law was declared in Beijing, the teaching of psychology was again halted. When Peng’s year at Michigan came to an end, not surprisingly he decided to pursue his career in the US. His psychology degree from China was not considered sufficient to enable him to teach here, since China had no doctoral program in psychology—and Peng still spoke English with a thick accent. So he went on to get a doctorate from the University of Michigan. Currently an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, Peng has received awards in both China and the US for his research, and he is now writing a textbook on cultural psychology. At 38, Peng is a warm, open man whose agenda extends far beyond the academic. He hopes that an awareness of cultural psychology will foster a more open society by uncovering mechanisms by which different cultures can more easily understand each other. Timothy Beneke: As someone who actively studies cultural assumptions of both Asians and Americans, you’re in a unique position to help other people understand their cultural biases. As a Euro-American male, I find it difficult to even acknowledge that I have cultural biases. What are some biases that Euro-Americans are blind to? Kaiping Peng: It’s difficult for anyone to see his cultural biases because they’re so entrenched and habitual. And Euro-Americans are in a dominant position in American culture, so events are less likely to force them to examine their biases. I should say that when I refer to Euro-Americans, I don’t mean people who are literally Euro-Americans but any Americans who have been absorbed into mainstream American culture. So, for example, third or fourth generation Chinese-Americans may have Euro-American biases. In other words, Euro-American biases are not properties of Euro-American individuals but characteristics of the culture. Research has revealed several interrelated biases. Social psychologists have long talked about what they called Fundamental Attribution Error, which is common to Euro-Americans and to Westerners generally. This is the tendency to explain human behavior in terms of properties of individuals or dispositions while ignoring the effects of the situation on behavior. I think of it as the Alex Trebeck effect. We watch him on Jeopardy and think he is very smart, forgetting that he already has the answers. The situation makes him appear smart, not something about him as an individual. My friend Michael Morris and I did several experiments in which subjects watch computer-animated fish swim by on a computer screen. We found that Euro-American subjects are more likely to understand the behavior of fish in terms of their assumed inner traits and dispositions. If I show a fish moving away from a school of fish, Euro-Americans will say that the fish is asserting its independence, while Chinese subjects are more likely to believe it’s been expelled by the school. And if there is a fish by itself and four fish together, Euro-Americans will focus their attention on the lone fish, while Chinese will focus on the group of fish. It may be that because Euro-Americans focus more attention on the individual and less on the environment, they explain behavior as based upon individual traits. If I ask what the group of fish is feeling, Euro-Americans will have trouble understanding the question—they always say, "Which fish?" It is very hard for Euro-Americans to conceive of a group feeling one thing. For Euro-Americans, people’s feelings are supposed to be private and individual and can’t be expressed by a group. In comparing Chinese and Euro-American explanations of two terrible murders, the Euro-American press and American subjects talk about inner causes, like mental instability or some "dark" features in the person’s nature. The Chinese press and Chinese subjects talk about situational causes to explain the incidents. The Chinese have difficulty understanding the concept of evil. They see everything as being part of a state of flux and change, so they tend to explain behavior in terms of situations. What is called the False Uniqueness Bias is another feature common to Euro-Americans. Euro-Americans tend to think of themselves as different from other people. If you ask Euro-Americans how likely it is that they will be divorced in five years or promoted in three years or become millionaires, there is a strong belief that they are one of the chosen few, and that positive things will happen to them and negative things will happen to other people. Psychologically, for Americans, I am not similar to others but others may sometimes be similar to me. This is the false uniqueness bias.
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