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

这个项目将调查许多领域的学者的争论，即东亚人和欧洲文化的产物有不同的推理。东亚人被认为是从整体上进行推理的，他们关注物体所在的‘场’或语境，并将因果关系归因于物体(人、动物或事物)与场之间的相互作用。此外，东亚没有形式逻辑的传统；相反，人们倾向于辩证法推理，在这种推理中，相反的事实或观点被解决。欧洲人被认为是分析型的，他们试图辨别物体的属性，并将因果关系归因于这些属性。形式逻辑在推理中发挥作用，并用于基于对象的类别成员关系创建关于对象行为的一般规律。初步研究为这些假说提供了一些支持。例如，美国人倾向于只用个性特征来解释人们的行为，而东亚人则根据社会背景来理解同样的行为。东亚人不太可能在进行归纳推理时使用类别，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出现的刺激事件。亚洲学生喜欢辩证法谚语，也就是涉及矛盾的谚语，他们更喜欢辩证法而不是线性论点。这个项目将建立在初步发现的基础上，检查1)使用基于形式规则的类别对对象进行分类的趋势与相似对象的记忆；2)检测对象特征之间的关系的能力与检测领域中事件之间的协变的能力；3)对对象与领域的关注程度；4)事件的因果归因与对象与领域的关系的程度；以及5)学习和使用抽象规则进行推理的能力。参与者将是在美留学的美国人、在美留学的中国人和中国。此外，还将研究可能导致文化差异的社会因素：预测是，在两个文化群体中，对社会领域的关注与整体推理风格有关。研究结果可能会对通常被认为是基本的认知过程的普遍性提出严肃的质疑，并表明心理学家可能没有正确地识别认知的“断层线”。例如，类别以及形式归纳和演绎规则的重要性可能没有人们通常认为的那么重要。研究结果还表明，在教授不同小组的成员时，可能需要考虑不同的学习风格；并提供证据，证明工作小组的文化多样性对解决问题具有优势。最后，研究结果与理解亚洲人和美国人在商业和政府背景下的互动有关：这两个群体对行为背后的动机可能有不同的、可能相互冲突的理解。

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.