ABC: A Social Experiment in Race, How Whites Differ from Asian Americans

A study from Stanford University has concluded if you tell a European American to cooperate, they will probably complain. If you tell the same thing to an Asian American, you’ll get a completely different reaction, reports ABC.

The experiment was designed to assess how cultural influence impacts a person’s willingness to cooperate.

“We found across our studies that when we ask white Americans to think of themselves as interdependent (think joiners) with others, we see a decrease in their motivation to act. They persist less at difficult challenges, and these effects are quite powerful,” said MarYam Hamedani, associate director of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and lead author of the study, in a telephone interview.

White Americans showed less willingness to cooperate than Asian Americans, whose culture is much more focused on family and community.