Cultural psychology
Chapter 9
Cognition and perception

Analytic and holistic thinking

In a taxomonic categorization strategy, stimuli are grouped according to the perceived similarity of their attributes. They are especially common among Westerners.

A thematic categorization strategy holds that stimuli are grouped together on the basis of causal, temporal, or spatial relationships among them. Common in East Asia.

Analytic thinking is characterized by a focus on objects and their attributes. Objects are perceived as existing independently from their contexts. They’re understood in terms of their component parts. The attributes that make up objects are used as a basis for categorizing them. A set of fixed abstract rules is used to predict and explain the behaviour of these objects.

Holistic thinking is characterized by an orientation to the context as a whole. It is an associative way of thinking, which gives attention to the relationships among objects and among the objects and the surrounding context. Objects are understood in terms of how they relate to the rest of the context, and their behaviour is predicted and explained on the basis of those relationships. It emphasizes knowledge gained through experience rather than the application of fixed abstract rules.

The origins of analytic and holistic thinking are argued to arise from the different social experiences people have within individualistic and collectivistic societies. People in collectivistic societies tend to be socialized in relational contexts and have their attention directed at relational concerns. People in individualistic societies are socialized to be independent and to have their attention focused on objects.

Cultural differences in understanding people (independent or interdependent) shape the kinds of information people attend to in their physical environments.

Analytic versus holistic thinking was apparent in Greek and Chinese thinking 2.500 years ago. That provided the intellectual groundwork. Holistic thinking is more common.

Attention

Attention is that at a given time, where one’s cognitive activity is directed. Analytic thinkers are more likely to focus their attention on separate parts of a scene. Holistic thinkers direct attention more broadly, across an entire scene.

Field independence is the ability to separate objects form their background fields. Field dependence is viewing object as bound to their backgrounds.  

The cultural difference is evident at the neural level. As people age, their neural functions continue to be shaped by normative cultural attention patterns. People rely on different brain regions for processing visual information in scenes.

People from different cultures devote attention to other things. The stimuli perceived by our brains are different across cultures.

Living in a busier physical environment seems to foster the ability to attend to a lot of information at once. (Like East Asia).

Understanding other people’s behaviours

Trying to understand people’s behaviour by considering their inner characteristics is an extension of an analytic way of thinking. Dispositional attributions are people’s underlying dispositions.

Explaining people’s behaviour by considering how the situation ins influencing them is an extension of a holistic way of thinking. Situational attributions.

The fundamental attribution error  

The fundamental attribution error is a tendency to ignore situational information while focusing on dispositional information. When we see people acting, we assume they are doing so because of their underlying dispositions, and we tend to ignore the situational constraints that might be driving their behaviour.

People in some other cultures do not tend to conceive of people’s behaviours in terms of underlying dispositions but instead see them as emerging out of the roles people have. 8-year olds give similar responses between the two cultures. But, as Westerns get older, they become more likely to make dispositional attributions. People from collectivistic cultures show a reverse fundamental attribution error.

Personality information is not seen as equally important for explaining the behaviour of others in all cultural contexts, although the cultural differences are most pronounced when the situational information is highly salient. The structure of personality is largely similar across cultures. Westerners tend to use personality information more for understanding others than East Asians do. The same goes for social class, people in a lower social class make more situational attributions

Reasoning styles

Analytic thinkers tend to view the world as operating according to a set of universal abstract rules and laws. They apply these rules and laws when they try to make sense of a situation. This is rule-based reasoning.

Holistic thinkers make sense of a situation by considering the relationships among objects or events. They look for evidence of events clustering together, such as similarity among events or of temporal contiguity of events. This is associative reasoning.

East Asians are more likely to use holistic reasoning when there is a conflict between an analytic and a holistic solution.

Holistic or analytic thinking influences reasoning styles in the kinds of information people perceive to be relevant for a task. A holistic thinker is aware of the countless ways that things in the world are related to each other. They tend to see actions as having distal, and sometimes unexpected, consequences. Analytic thinkers focus their attention on the relations between a relatively small number of discrete objects or events.

Toleration of contradiction

East Asians seem to share a view that reality is continually in flux. Opposing truths can be simultaneously accepted. Naïve dialectism is the acceptance of contradiction.

Westerners have the law of non-contradiction. No statement could be both truth and false.

Westerners can respond to a contradiction by denying that it exist. East Asians accept the contradiction and do not seem motivated to get rid of it.

East Asians think of themselves as more contradictory. The more contradictory self-views among East Asians are associated with less consistency in their self-concepts.

Westerners appear to view to view change as occurring in more linear way than do East Asians. East Asians believe that change itself happens in a rather fluid and unpredictable way.

Creative thinking

Socratic learning styles that originated in Greece put more emphasis on self-discovery compared with Confucian styles of learning that emphasized the mastery of the material.

Creativity is the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful an appropriate.

The generation of novel ideas appears to be facilitated by individualism. A greater motivation for uniqueness might underlie this tendency.

Collectivism appears to be associated with the generation of useful rather than novel ideas. In collective contexts people are socialized to be concerned about the opinions of others and to find solutions that will fit with the goals of the members of their groups.

When a new idea comes around, one can make a distinction between ideas that are breakthrough innovations or make smaller, incremental improvements.

More collectivistic cultures are more likely to foster incremental innovations. More individualistic cultures encourage more breakthrough innovations.

Talking and thinking

Talking and language have held a privileged position in much of Western intellectual history. Among the ancient Greeks, there was no greater skill than to be a good debater. Speaking is valued in the West because it is viewed as an act of self-expression and as inextricably bound to thought.

In many East Asian traditions there has been less emphasis on talking, if not outright suspicion of the spoken word. Eastern cultural traditions have not cultivated a belief that thought and speech are closely related.

Holistic thinking involves an attention to the whole and the perception of how various parts are interrelated. The nature of holistic thinking makes it difficult to express in words because speech is ultimately a sequential task. You can’t easily describe multiple relations at once.

Analytic thinking, with the emphasis on focusing on separate parts, lends itself well to the spoken word. Each part can be described separately and sequentially.

Verbal descriptions interfere with the ability to process stimuli as a whole.

If what you say is viewed to be consistent with what is in your head, then speech can serve an important role for self-expression. To the extent that talking and thinking are viewed as intertwined, it is reasonable for others to infer things about you based on what you say.

Explicit versus implicit communication

There are cultural differences in the degree to which communication relies on explicit verbal information versus more implicit nonverbal cues: 1) High-context culture, people are deeply involved with each other, and this involvement leads them to have much shared information that guides their behaviour. There are clear and appropriate ways of behaving in each situation, and this information is widely shared and understood, so it doesn’t need to be explicitly communicated. Much of what is to be communicated can be inferred because people have a great deal of information in common that they can rely on, they can be less explicit in what they say. 2) Low-context culture, there is relatively less involvement among individuals, there is less shared information to guide behaviour. It is necessary for people to communicate in more explicit detail, as others are less able to fill in the gaps of what is not said.

In collectivistic cultures, the key information is conveyed nonverbally, with the content of the words sometimes being rather empty.  

Linguistic relativity

The Whorfian (or linguistic relativity) hypothesis holds that the language we speak affects how we think.

One language obliges people to think about certain ideas. Numerous words and concepts simply don’t exist in many languages of the world.

Linguistic relativity and colour perception

Colour is a continuous variable that extends gradually through all the hues of the rainbow, yet linguistically it is a discrete variable. Different languages parse the spectrum of colours in dramatically divergent ways.

There is tremendous diversity in the ways people label colours, and this diversity emerges in systematic ways. All known languages have a minimum of two colour terms. People who speak different languages carve up the colour spectrum in some rather divergent ways, but these differences do not emerge arbitrarily, and there are some strikingly consistent patterns across cultures.

We tend to perceive stimuli in categorical terms, even though the stimuli may gradually differ along a continuum. People’s perception of the different colours is influenced by the colour categories used in their respective languages.

Linguistic relativity and perceptions of agency

When describing an accident in English, people commonly use an agentive description. This isn’t the same for all languages.

Linguistic relativity and spatial perception

There are differences in how languages describe how objects are distributed in space. English speakers often identify locations based on their positions relative to the speaker.

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr identify space in absolute terms, as described by points on a compass. They conceive of the arrangement of their world only with respect to these directions.

The tendency to conceive of directions relative to one’s own egocentric position is a relatively recent development, and one that is peculiar to some industrialized countries.

For English speakers, time passes from one relative spatial marker to another, and this does not change depending on the direction one is facing.

Numerical cognition

Our ability to reason with numbers very much reflects the experiences we have had in or cultures.

In the absence of linguistic terms for specific numbers, people from some cultural groups do not seem able to understand the associated numerical concepts.

Without the cultural input, people do not have an innate linear sense of numbers.