A comfort with contradiction

Another Unit 1 post

During undergrad, I spent a summer semester in London. While there, I stayed at a friend of a friend’s house and hung out with a business man named Simon. Simon was very sad because he worked for an American company. And what made him sad was that he had just 2 weeks of vacation – a near abusive, intolerable amount of time required at the office.

During that summer, I had many conversations around the American tendency to be goal and action oriented, while the British and European ways are less so. The thinking was that non-Americans are more in tune with the complexities in every day life and more likely to approach things more in a cyclical than linear fashion.

I thought of those conversations again, with the American’s un-relentless focus on results and productivity with the more laid back aims of other countries (not counting Germany!!), when reading of a study (in Learning in Adulthood) that tried to measure dialectical thought. According to Kegan, this is a level that is reached through conflict and is described as “testing of paradoxical and contradictory formulations” (Merriam, 344). Most adults do not even begin to achieve this until their 40s.

So where does culture come to play? According to Simon, American’s are action oriented and not prone to very deep reflection. The cultural differences in dialectical thinking seemed even more pronounced when comparing Chinese and American preferences for proverbs – the Chinese students were more comfortable with the dialectical ones, the American’s with the non-dialectical. East meets west. And while the authors describe this factor a trait of adult intelligence, it seems less to do with intelligence and more with culture and upbringing, as well as the values of society. The authors do mention a study that seemed to indicate this – one researcher found that there was no difference in ability, just in the tendency to display the thought processes (Merriam, 346). So I guess Americans are no more or no less complex than anyone else – we’re just less comfortable showing it.