Douglas T. Kenrick Ph.D. –

A few years ago, I heard a talk by a young graduate student at Stanford named Heejung Kim. She had just won the highly prestigious dissertation award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.  Kim was asking a simple question: Does it help your thinking to talk with other people about your ongoing thought processes?  Kim’s findings were memorable because the answer was completely opposite for Asian Americans and European Americans.

Why don’t Asian students talk more in class?

When she later published her results, in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Kim, now a professor at UC Santa Barbara, noted that American professors were sometimes concerned about Asian students, who often sat silently through class, and were reluctant to express their ideas.