Perception of Consequences Among Cultures

One of my interests is applying cognitive psychology to security. The field of how people think, perceive their surroundings and act is pretty fascinating and there's a large body of cognition research that is directly applicable to the practice of humanitarian security. It's part of what I call "The Inner Game of Security" (shamelessly stolen from the title of Jeff Gallwey's classic book, The Inner Game of Tennis, first published in 1972).

To give you an example, here's a link to some recent research that talks about the differences between how Asian and European/American cultures make decisions and reason about consequences. In summary, Asians tend to take more of a holistic approach while Americans lean toward analytical reasoning, not taking as much context into consideration.

I'll be posting more about cognitive psychology in the future. In the meantime, if you're interested, check out Cognitive Daily and Mixing Memory. Two great blogs that discuss cognition research (usually in fairly easy to understand language).