A university experiment comparing the creative thinking of Taiwanese and Canadian students has found that while the Canadians generated more ideas, the Taiwanese ideas were better.
Gad Saad a behavioral scientist and professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, Concordia graduate student Louis Ho and University of Western Ontario associate professor of marketing Mark Cleveland wanted to test a stereotype of Western and Asian thinking.
The stereotype is that the West is a hub of creativity, innovation and product development, while Asian countries tend to focus on one idea and perfect existing products.
The researchers expected students from Canada’s “individualistic culture” to do well on innovative thinking and expected students from Taiwan’s “collectivist culture” to be less likely to show out-of-the-box thinking so as not to stand out from the group.
“With respect to individualism versus collectivism, we thought individuals from Canada would be more likely to express themselves, would be less concerned about criticisms, would be more focused on individual achievement, more likely to generate more ideas and higher quality ideas,” Cleveland said.
However, it turned out that while the Canadians were more productive, their ideas were of lesser quality, he said.
“That goes against what we hypothesized,” he said.
A total of about 300 students from the two nations were broken up into teams of four to brainstorm two questions judged to be culturally neutral and concerning subjects that the students were not likely to have thought about beforehand: “How would you attract tourists to an underwater city?” and “What would be the practical benefits of a second thumb?”
“Affirming the individualistic and collectivistic character of the Canadian and Taiwanese samples, the quantity of ideas generated was substantially higher for Canadians whereas the quality and originality of ideas generated was higher for Taiwanese,” says an abstract of the study, which will be published next month by the Journal of Business Research.
Canadian teams produced about twice as many ideas as the Taiwanese teams. The Canadians were also more confident in supporting their own ideas and more ready to criticize their teammates’ ideas.
While the Taiwanese were reluctant to criticize other team members, the judges gave their ideas higher marks for originality.
Saad said the Taiwanese ideas might have been superior because students from collectivist societies tend to be more reflective and to think hard before committing to a course of action.
“To maximize the productivity of their international teams, global firms need to understand important cultural differences between Western and Eastern mindsets,” Saad said.
“Brainstorming, a technique often used to generate novel ideas such as new product innovations, might not be equally effective across cultural settings,” he said.
“Even though individuals from collectivistic societies might be coming up with fewer creative ideas, the quality of those ideas tends to be just as good as or marginally better than those of their individualistic counterparts,” he said. “Employers need to recognize that.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods