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Lucia and Jeff are students at the same university. They have been in a relationship for three years. How likely do you think it is that they will break up after graduation? It turns out that people can have quite different answers to such a seemingly simple question (Ji et al., 2001). Students in the United States were more likely to say that the couple would stay together after graduation. Students in China, on the other hand, were more likely to think that the couple would break up after graduation. The argument proposed here was that the East and West have culturally different views about the nature of change (as influenced by different philosophical traditions), with the former thinking of change as more cyclical and the latter thinking of change as more linear. For readers who might belong to either of the two cultures, the typical response of individuals from the other culture may seem surprising. But such is the …