Task 1 - Individualist vs. Collectivist Cognition Flashcards
Western Cognition
- Attend to focal object
- analyze attributes
- formal logic
- emphasis on individual objects (e.g. in art)
Eastern Cognition
Attend to broad perceptual & conceptual field
- focus on relationship & changes
- group based on family resemblance
- emphasis on field, not on objects
Causality Attribution Differences
Western: focus exlusively on object
Eastern: attributions based on context
Causes of differences in Cognition
- social factors
- early training
Social Factors
East Asions: tend to live in communities with prescribed roles; contain more objects
Westerners: less constraining social networks
Western Early training
- Babies sleep in separate beds from parents
- Emphasis on objects and their attributes
Eastern Early Training
- Rarely sleep in bed separate from parents
- emphasis on feelings and relationships
Greeks
- used formal logic
- focused on single object
- better in geometry
Chinese
- focused on entirety
- worse in geometry but better in magnetism and astronomy (moon and tides)
Causal Attribution
Individualist: explain events with properties of objects
Interdependent: explain events with reference between object and field
Decision-making
Interdependent cultures more likely to compromise in conflicts
-> try to find truth; individualistic: more inclined to reject one in favor of other
Categorization
East Asians: classify based on relationships and family resemblance (cow & grass: cow eats grass)
Americans: classify by rule-based category membership (cow and chicken, both animals)
Detection of Covariation
Chinese: focus on field, better at judging covariation
Field dependence
- Chinese: difficulty separating objects from surroundings
- -> focus more on field
Attention to field
Americans: mention salient objects first
-Japanese: mention info about field first
Change blindness
Pictures shown sequentially (not side-by-side)
- Americans: noticed changes in objects more
- Japanese: noticed changes in relationships and environmnet more
WEIRD cultures
Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic cultures
WEIRD problem
- most studies are of WEIRD cultures (92% psychology studies from US)
- WEIRD cultures unusual in global perspective though
Reasoning Differences
Western: rely on analytical reasoning strategies
Asians: rely on holistic reasoning strategies
Holistic Thinking
Considering objects or scenarios (e.g. people’s behaviors) by focusing on context and relationships between focal object and its context
Analytic Thinking
Focusing on the focal objects and its features:
- more likely to attend to focal object
- more susceptible to primacy effect
Memory Differences
Individualistic: better in memory for categorically processed information
-more categorical-based memory errors
Interdependent:
-better in memory for contextual information
-memory advantages in multitasking (see the entire picture)
Heuristic Differences
Americans: stronger representative heuristics: more likely to expect cause and effect to correspond in magnitude
Chinese: more likely to understand and appreaciate regression towards the mean
Information processing differences
Americans: stronger future orientation (value it more)
East Asians: stronger past orientation (put less weight on most immediate infromation, past and future perceived more connected to present)
