Cognition East and West: Attention Categorization, and Reasoning for East Asians and European Americans

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This project will investigate the contention of scholars in many fields that East Asians and people who are products of European culture reason differently. East Asians are held to reason holistically, attending to the `field` or context in which objects are embedded and attributing causality to interactions between the object (person, animal, or thing) and the field. Also, there is no tradition of formal logic in East Asia; instead there is a preference for `dialectical` reasoning in which opposing facts or points of view are resolved. Europeans are held to be analytic, attempting to discern properties of the object and attributing causality to such properties. Formal logic plays a role in reasoning and is used to create general laws about the behavior of objects based on their category memberships. Preliminary research provides some support for these hypotheses. For example, Americans tend to explain the behavior of people by referring exclusively to personality traits, whereas East Asians understand the same behavior in terms of the social context. East Asians are less likely to use categories in making inductive inferences, for example, to spontaneously think of `mammals` when asked to generalize from one animal to another. East Asians more accurately detect covariation among arbitrary stimulus events in the environment, such as those presented in different locations on a computer screen. Asian students like dialectic proverbs, that is, those involving a contradiction, and prefer dialectic to linear arguments. This project will build on the preliminary findings by examining 1) the tendency to classify objects using categories based on formal rules vs. memory for similar objects; 2) the ability to detect relationships among features of an object vs. ability to detect covariation among events in the field; 3) the degree to which attention is paid to the object vs. the field; 4) the degree to which causal attribution for events is to the object vs. to the field; and 5) the ability to learn and use abstract rules for reasoning. Participants will be Americans studied in the U.S., and Chinese studied in the U. S. and China. Additional work will study the social factors which presumably underlie the cultural differences: the prediction is that attention to the social field with be associated with holistic reasoning style within both cultural groups. Results are expected to raise serious questions about the universality of cognitive processes commonly regarded as basic and to suggest that psychologists may not have correctly identified the `fault lines` of cognition. For example, the importance of categories and formal inductive and deductive rules may be less great than generally presumed. The results can also be expected to suggest that there may be different styles of learning that should be taken into consideration when teaching members of different groups; and to provide evidence that cultural diversity of work groups has advantages for problem-solving. Finally, the results are relevant to understanding interaction between Asians and Americans in business and government contexts: The two groups are likely to have different and potentially conflicting understandings of the motives underlying behavior.