Independence, Interdependence and Analytic vs. Holistic Cognition

尼斯贝特和他的同事们最近的研究表明，西方人和东亚人在感知和推理的许多方面存在显著差异。 西方人的感知和推理方式可以被描述为分析。他们倾向于关注一些突出的对象，识别其属性，对对象进行分类，并应用规则来建模和解释对象的行为，所采用的规则包括形式逻辑。相比之下，东亚人的感知和推理方式可以被称为整体。 他们往往关注对象所处的广阔领域以及对象与领域之间的关系。 关系和相似性被用来组织世界，辩证推理（例如，在极端之间寻找中间道路）取代了形式逻辑。 本研究的目的是确定文化的一个特定的广泛方面，即一个群体的个人主义与集体主义特征的程度，是认知差异的来源。西方人是独立的和个人主义的，因此他们有奢侈的关注某个对象，他们有一个目标，而东方人更相互依存和集体主义，必须参加他们生活在复杂的社会世界。注意力、因果归因、对物体和事件的组织以及推理方面的差异都源于这些差异。拟议的研究衡量个人主义与集体主义的社会取向。 人们的预期是，社会取向，而不是与西方人和亚洲人之间的差异有关的其他因素，将产生文化和认知之间的关系。为了证明社会取向会影响认知差异，本研究将考察西方社会取向不同的亚文化（如北方与南方意大利、东欧与西欧、美国天主教徒与新教徒、工人阶级与中产阶级）。预计亚文化在被认为是分析性的方面与整体性的方面有所不同。这项研究涉及广泛的社会问题，特别是教育问题。 这项研究可能会揭示出一些方法，让更多的分析型的人能够学到整体思维的有用方面，让更多的整体型的人能够学到分析型思维的有用方面。

Recent work by Nisbett and his colleagues has demonstrated marked differences between Westerners and East Asians in a number of aspects of perception and reasoning. Westerners perceive and reason in ways that can be described as analytic. They tend to focus on some salient object, identify its attributes, categorize the object, and apply rules to model and explain the object's behavior, and the rules employed include formal logic. In contrast, East Asians perceive and reason in ways that can be called holistic. They tend to focus on the broad field in which an object is located and the relation between the object and the field. Relationships and similarities are used to organize the world, and dialectical reasoning (for example, seeking the middle way between extremes) substitutes for formal logic. The aim of this research is to establish that a particular broad aspect of culture, namely the degree of individualism vs. collectivism characteristic of a group, is a source of the cognitive differences. Westerners are independent and individualistic and they consequently have the luxury of focusing on some object with respect to which they have a goal, whereas Easterners are more interdependent and collectivist and must attend to the complicated social worlds they live in. Differences in attention, causal attribution, organization of objects and events, and reasoning derive from these differences. The proposed research measures social orientation toward individualism vs. collectivism. The anticipation is that social orientation, and not some other factor associated with differences between Westerners and Asians, will produce the relationship between culture and cognition. In order to demonstrate that social orientation influences cognitive differences, the research will examine subcultures within the West (such as northern vs. southern Italy, eastern vs. western Europe, American Catholics vs. Protestants, working class vs. middle class) which differ in social orientation. The subcultures are expected to differ in aspects of that are considered to be analytic vs. holistic. The research is relevant to a wide range of social issues, most notably in education. The research may uncover ways in which more analytic people can be taught useful aspects of holistic thinking and more holistic people can be taught useful aspects of analytic ways of thinking.