Asians, Americans see the world differently

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

"They literally are seeing the world differently," said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

"Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do," he said in a telephone interview. "They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it."

The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.

And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.

Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.