A recent article in the New Scientist looks at how culture shapes the way we think. Yet it also warns against simplistic stereotypes:
"One of the pioneers of this research is Richard Nisbett. In his book The Geography of Thought, he recounts a study in which he asked American and Japanese students to describe animated videos of underwater scenes. As befits the stereotype, the Americans were more likely to start by mentioning prominent objects such as brightly coloured moving fish or aquatic plants, while the vast majority of the Japanese students started by saying something about the context - the scene looked like a stream, or the water was green....
"However, recently it has become apparent that the east-west dichotomy is not as clear-cut as this....
"For example, Nisbett's group recently compared three communities living in Turkey's Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent. He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders...."
You can read the full article here.