Americans wear black for mourning while Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University if California, Berkeley, a psychologist, has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures--polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth. His findings go gar toward explaining why American cultures seem to be aggressive and Chinese cultures so passive, when compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the way for the peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in basic ways. The Chinese could learn much from Western methods for determining scientific truth, said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing Scholar, who is now a UC Berkley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from he Chinese tolerance for accepting contradictions in social and personal life, he said. "Americans have a terrible need to find out who is right in an argument," said Peng. "The problem is that at the interpersonal level you really don't need to find the truth, , or maybe there isn't any." Chinese people, said Peng, are far more content to think that both sides have advantages and disadvantages, because they have a whole awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the individual than do Americans, he added. In studies of interpersonal argument, for example, when subjects were asked to deal with contradictory information resulting from conflict between a mother and a daughter or a student and a school, Peng found that Americans were "non-compromising, blaming one side -- usually the mother -- for the causes of the problems, demanding changes from one side to attain a solution and offering no compromise" in dealing with the conflict. Compared to this angry, blaming American method, the Chinese were paragons of compromise, finding fault on both sides and looking for solutions that moved both sides to the middle. The main idea of the passage is  _  .
polarities between American and Chinese cultures extreme ends of the string different attitudes towards the aged different manners in social occasions