How to understand the differences between eastern and western thinking modes? Hou Yubo's entry into WTO has brought unprecedented challenges to China. These challenges not only come from the economic and technological fields, but more importantly, with the acceleration of China's opening to the outside world, our culture is also undergoing profound changes. The experience of China's development in the 20th century tells us that sticking to tradition and westernization will bring disastrous consequences to the development of China society. Therefore, it is an important subject of psychological research to deeply study the cultural differences between the East and the West and understand the mechanism of cultural influence. In these studies, the study of eastern and western ways of thinking provides us with a brand-new way to understand the cultural influence. First, the psychological background of thinking mode research began in the 1960s. A group of cultural scholars concerned about the differences between China and the West, represented by Weber and Xu, began to emphasize the role of social factors and cultural factors in the formation and development of personality, and believed that a country's culture and historical traditions determined its national character. In their view, China's traditional culture emphasizes harmony, while western culture emphasizes conflict and enterprising, so China people's personality orientation is moderate and pays attention to the handling of interpersonal relationships; Westerners are enterprising in character and pay attention to the pursuit of personal achievements. The views of Weber and others inspired the famous cultural psychologist Triadis, who put forward the concept of individualism-collectivism, pointing out that oriental culture is a collectivism culture, emphasizing the harmony of internal groups, focusing on the goals of internal groups, and emphasizing the norms and responsibilities of groups; Western culture is an individualistic culture, which emphasizes personal needs and values and pays attention to personal dignity and self-development. Since 1970s, the debate about individualism and collectivism has been attracting the attention of cultural psychologists. It was not until the mid-1990s that people discovered that the concepts of individualism and collectivism remained at a shallow level to analyze the cultural differences between the East and the West and their influences. In order to understand the cultural differences between the East and the West and their influences, we must analyze them from people's internal assumptions, and the way of thinking, as a metacognitive feature when people process information and understand social things, is such an internal assumption. Cultural psychology takes the way of thinking as an inherent assumption to understand cultural differences, which is related to their reflection on mainstream psychology. Since18th century, western philosophical psychologists, such as Locke and Hume, have always regarded human cognitive processes, including classification, learning, reasoning and attribution, as things unaffected by culture. This idea has a great influence on the whole scientific community, such as the simulation of brain cognitive process in artificial intelligence and other fields. In the field of psychology, Piaget's discussion on cognitive development, Hyde's attribution theory and Festinger's discussion on cognitive dissonance have never considered the influence of culture on these processes. This situation did not change until the 1990s, which is closely related to psychologists' research on the relationship between thinking mode and thinking and cognition. Many psychologists engaged in cultural studies have found that the differences in behavior and cognition between the East and the West are closely related to their ways of thinking, and the differences in thinking between the East and the West profoundly reflect the differences in culture and epistemology, so the differences in thinking are actually the results and manifestations of the long-term effects of culture. Second, the opposition between eastern and western ways of thinking: dialectical thinking and logical thinking. The opposition between eastern and western ways of thinking is mainly reflected in the opposition between dialectical thinking and logical thinking. Scholars often use dialectical thinking to describe the way of thinking of orientals, especially China people, and use logical thinking or analytical thinking to describe the way of thinking of westerners, especially Europeans and Americans. In their view, China people's dialectical thinking contains three principles: the theory of change, the theory of contradiction and the theory of neutralization. Based on the variability of the world, the theory of variation holds that the world is always changing and there is no eternal right or wrong; The theory of contradiction holds that everything is a contradictory unity composed of opposites. Without contradiction, there is no thing itself, while the doctrine of neutralization is embodied in the doctrine of the mean, which holds that everything has moderate rationality. For China people, the "golden mean" has been accumulated for thousands of years, and even internalized into the personality characteristics of China people. . Mr. Lu Xun once commented: "The character of China people always likes reconciliation and compromise. For example, if you say that this room is too dark, you must open a window here, and everyone must not allow it. But if you advocate tearing down the roof of the house, they will come to settle and be willing to open the window. Without fierce opinions, it is always not feasible for peaceful reform. " The "harmony between man and nature" in Confucianism and the theory of Yin and Yang in Taoism are the concentrated manifestations of this dialectical view. Among them, "harmony between man and nature" is the ideological basis of China people's pursuit of harmony. On the one hand, it embodies China people's world outlook (referring to a nation's views and assumptions about the world, including the composition of the universe, its control and people's position in the universe, etc. China people believe in the relevance and organic nature of the universe, and think that the universe is a balanced body composed of all substances existing in it, and its existence and operation are not the result of supernatural authority (while western society believes in such forces, such as God's arrangement); On the other hand, it is related to China people's handling of interpersonal relationships and conflicts. China people think that harmony is a kind of beauty. As Zong Baihua thought in Aesthetic Walking: "This kind of harmony is the beauty of the universe and the basis of the beauty of life. The way to achieve this beauty, in Aristotle's view, is to "grasp the middle" and "mean". However, the doctrine of the mean is not vulgar and first-class, nor is it a compromise of ambiguity and hesitation. This is an impartial perseverance and comprehensive will ... to achieve personal harmony. So the doctrine of the mean is the peak of good, not the middle of good and evil. " Different from China's dialectical thinking, westerners' thinking is a kind of logical thinking. This thought emphasizes the unity, non-contradiction and neutrality of the world. Identity holds that the essence of things will not change, and a thing will always be itself; A proposition can't be right or wrong at the same time. Exclusive neutrality emphasizes that one thing is either right or wrong and there is no neutrality. The western way of thinking is also called analytical thinking. They don't pursue compromise and harmony like China people, but like to separate things from a whole and make a logical analysis of their essential characteristics. It is precisely because of the different ways of thinking that, in some cases, the basic attribution bias committed by orientals and westerners is just the opposite: when attributing the behavior of others, Americans emphasize the role of individuals, while under the same circumstances, China emphasizes the role of the environment and others. For example, psychologist Peng Kaiping and others have studied the attribution of two murders by Americans and China people, and found that China people tend to attribute the events to the surrounding environment, while Americans believe that the characteristics of the murderer himself led to the result of the murder. Westerners' logical thinking is also reflected in their theoretical thinking on human nature and personality development, and Eriksson's concept of self-identity is the embodiment of this thinking. In Eriksson's view, when an individual goes through the drastic changes in adolescence, he will form a stable self-concept in personality. Only at this stage can the development of personality be considered mature. From this theory, we can see that westerners pay more attention to the stability of personality, because only through stability can we make reasonable predictions about the behavior of others. On the contrary, China people emphasize variability and think that only through change can we better adapt to the environment. This difference is also reflected in the literary concepts of the East and the West. For example, in Homer's epic The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is fickle, and in The Journey to the West, one of China's four classical novels, the hero the Monkey King is also very popular because of fickle. Fortunately, our research in this field supports the above hypothesis about the differences between eastern and western thinking to some extent. Through the factor analysis of more than 500 China people's way of thinking, it is found that China people's way of thinking can be measured from five dimensions: ① variability: the world is constantly developing and changing, and nothing is static; 2 contradiction: the world is not precise and clear, but a unity full of contradictions; ③ Compromise: China people prefer the mean to extreme things; ④ Connectivity: The world is universally connected, and nothing can exist independently without other things; ⑤ Harmony: objective things are meaningful only when they are put together with other things. As for the dimension of western thinking mode, we are doing exploratory research with foreign partners, but there are also many empirical studies that conform to the above analysis and reflect the characteristics of western thinking from different aspects. Third, the reasons for the differences between the eastern and western ways of thinking Many studies have proved that there are huge differences between the eastern and western ways of thinking. What is the source of this difference? Here, we can learn from Nisbet, a famous American cultural psychologist. In his view, the development of eastern and western cultures has its own track: Western civilization is based on the ancient Greek tradition, and Aristotle's logical and analytical thinking is the characteristic of its way of thinking, while the eastern culture represented by China is based on the eastern tradition deeply influenced by Confucianism and Taoism, and dialectical and holistic thinking is the main characteristic of its way of thinking. Starting with the social practice orientation of ancient Greece and China, he systematically expounded the origin and characteristics of eastern and western thinking. First of all, from the social background, ancient Greek society emphasized individual characteristics and freedom, and it was a society dominated by individualism; In ancient China, however, it emphasized the relationship between individuals and society and was characterized by collectivism. This different emphasis determines the corresponding philosophical beliefs and leads to different answers to scientific and philosophical questions, including: continuity and discontinuity; Fields and objects; Relationship and similarity with classification and rules; Dialectics and logic, etc. Secondly, from the perspective of social cognitive system, different philosophies and epistemology in the East and the West have constructed different psychological theories under the social and historical background. The complex social relations in China people's lives make China people have to pay attention to the outside world, so China people's self-structure is dependent; On the contrary, westerners live in simple social relations, so they are more likely to pay attention to their own objects and goals. In this social cognitive system, social organizations have a direct impact on the cognitive process, and dialectical and logical thinking are the characteristics of this cognitive process. More importantly, this feature has been maintained, which has a wide impact on people's psychology and behavior: China people's cognition is situation-centered, while Americans are individual-centered; China people look at the world with a passive attitude, while Americans conquer the world with an active attitude. Finally, from the ecological background, China culture is based on agricultural society, which is a complex hierarchical society, emphasizing hierarchy and harmony; Greek civilization, in sharp contrast with China civilization, is not complete.