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

东西方认知：东亚人和欧洲裔美国人的注意力分类和推理

• 批准号: 9729103
• 负责人: Richard Nisbett
• 金额: $ 27.6万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-03-15 至 2002-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9729103&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cognition; East; West; Attention; Categorization

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.

本研究将探讨不同领域的学者关于东亚人与欧洲文化产物的人的推理方式不同的争论。 东亚人被认为是从整体上进行推理的，关注对象所嵌入的“场”或背景，并将因果关系归因于对象（人，动物或事物）与场之间的相互作用。 此外，在东亚没有形式逻辑的传统;相反，有一种“辩证”推理的偏好，在这种推理中，对立的事实或观点得到解决。 欧洲人被认为是分析性的，试图辨别物体的属性，并将因果关系归因于这些属性。形式逻辑在推理中起着重要作用，用于根据对象的类别成员关系创建关于对象行为的一般规律。 初步研究为这些假设提供了一些支持。例如，美国人倾向于通过完全引用人格特质来解释人们的行为，而东亚人则从社会背景的角度来理解同样的行为。 东亚人在进行归纳推理时不太可能使用类别，例如，当被要求从一种动物概括到另一种动物时，他们会自发地想到“哺乳动物”。 东亚人更准确地检测环境中任意刺激事件之间的协变，例如计算机屏幕上不同位置的刺激事件。亚洲学生喜欢辩证的谚语，也就是那些涉及矛盾的谚语，喜欢辩证而不是线性的论点。 本项目将在初步研究结果的基础上，通过检查1）使用基于形式规则的类别对相似对象进行分类的倾向; 2）检测对象特征之间的关系的能力与检测现场事件之间的协变的能力; 3）对对象与现场的关注程度; 4）事件的因果归因是对象还是领域的程度; 5）学习和使用抽象规则进行推理的能力。参与者将是在美国学习的美国人，和中国留学生。S.和中国 额外的工作将研究的社会因素，大概是文化差异的基础：预测是，关注社会领域与整体推理风格在两个文化群体。 结果预计将提出严重的问题，普遍认为是基本的认知过程的普遍性，并建议心理学家可能没有正确地识别认知的“断层线”。例如，范畴和形式归纳与演绎规则的重要性可能不如一般所设想的那么大。研究结果还表明，在教授不同群体的成员时，可能会考虑到不同的学习风格;并提供证据表明，工作群体的文化多样性有利于解决问题。最后，研究结果与理解亚洲人和美国人在商业和政府环境中的互动有关：这两个群体对行为背后的动机可能有不同的理解，甚至可能相互冲突。