Chapter 9

Question 1

analytic vs. holistic thinking

Answer 1

• Analytic: focusing on objects and their attributes
• Holistic: focusing on the context as a whole; paying attention to relationships between objects
• • More common worldwide than analytic thinking

Question 2

attention (and its differences between analytic and holistic thinkers)

Answer 2

• where one’s cognitive activity is directed at a given time
• Analytic thinkers more likely to focus on discrete parts of a scene (like the most important/central element)
• Holistic thinkers more likely to focus on entire scene/background context; good at tasks involving figuring out relations among events, bad at tasks involving separating scene into parts (ie. Rod-and-Frame task)
• • Evidence: Japanese participants made more saccades (quick eye movements that shift gaze from one point to another) when looking at a photo compared to Americans → they were systematically scanning the entire image more

Question 3

paintings in different cultures

Answer 3

• European paintings: In portraits, they have larger figures → draws attention to the people
• Asian paintings:
• • In portraits, have smaller figures → draws attention to the overall scene
• • Scenes are busier and have more elements, likely due to the fact that Asian cities are busier → reflects their context

Question 4

2 reasoning styles

Answer 4

• Rule-based reasoning: applying universal rules and laws when trying to make sense of situations
• • Common amongst more analytical thinkers
• • Ex. This flower belongs in group A because they all have curved stems
• Associative reasoning: looking for relationships/similarity between objects or events in order to make sense of them
• • Common amongst more holistic thinkers
• • Ex. This flower belongs in group B because it looks similar to most of the flowers in this group

Question 5

Views towards contradiction

Answer 5

• When Americans encounter 2 contradictory statements, they tend to believe the better statement is even more compelling than when they only see 1 statement → denying that the contradiction exists → there is only 1 good argument
• When Chinese participants encounter 2 contradictory statements, they tend to believe the weaker statement is even more compelling than when they only see 1 statement → accepting the contradiction → difficult to say which one is right or wrong

Question 6

views toward change

Answer 6

• Westerners tend to believe that change will progress in a linear fashion → ex. If stock is rising, it will probably continue to rise
• • More likely to predict that trends will continue
• East Asians tend to believe that change happens in fluid and unpredictable ways → ex. If stock is rising, it could fall
• • More likely to predict that trends will reverse

Question 7

creativity (and its prevalence in eastern vs. western culture)

Answer 7

• Creativity: generation of ideas that are novel and useful/appropriate
• • By certain measures, creativity is more common in Western cultures → Socratic styles of learning emphasize self-discovery
• – More interested in producing novel things (1st element of creativity) and making breakthrough innovations
• People in Asian cultures tend to be more focused on mastering techniques or reproducing things (ex. Classical music) than they are on creating something original → Confucian styles of learning emphasize mastery of material
• • More interested in coming up with useful/appropriate solutions (2nd part of creativity) and making incremental improvements

Question 8

talking and thinking: different cultural values

Answer 8

• The idea that people should participate/speak up in class is rooted in Western ideals → assumes talking reflects thinking and engagement (not the case in Asian culture)
• Japanese mothers speak less to young children; Chinese infants vocalize less compared to European-Americans → doesn’t indicate less communication though; they just rely more on non-verbal communication

Question 9

talking and thinking: IQ test study

Answer 9

• • Talking is actually related to thinking: thinking out loud reduces scores of Asian-Americans on an IQ test (impairs thinking; whereas just talking/saying alphabet didn’t impact them because they consider it a separate task), but improves the scores of European-Americans (who did worse when they had to talk/say the alphabet without thinking out loud because they consider talking/thinking the same, so talking about something unrelated impairs thinking)
• • Analytic thinking lends itself better to the spoken word than holistic

Question 10

Linguistic relativity and colour perception

Answer 10

• Different languages have different terms used to describe colours (all have at least 2 - black and white)
• Early evidence showed that colour perception and memory are largely independent of the words people have to describe colour, but researchers weren’t so sure
• • Robertson expanded on this research because he believed that different colour categories should affect people’s categorical perception: we perceive stimuli as belonging to separate and discrete categories, even though it may actually differ along a continuum

Question 11

linguistic relativity and colour perception: Robertson’s chip test study

Answer 11

given 3 chips, had to say whether chip 1 or chip 2 was closest in colour to the target chip → answered differed cross-culturally depending on how that language categorized colours → language can affect colour perception

Question 12

linguistic relativity and odor perception

Answer 12

English has relatively few terms to describe odors, and we tend to be worse at identifying odors than people from cultures with many olfactory terms → indicates that olfaction vocab influences odor perception/recognition

Question 13

linguistic relativity and perceptions of agency

Answer 13

Languages that use agentive descriptions (ex. “He broke the vase”) compared to non-agentive descriptions (ex. “The vase was broken”) are more likely to remember who did unintentional behaviours (like accidentally breaking the vase)

Question 14

linguistic relativity and spatial perception:

Answer 14

• both spatial perception and time perception are grounded in linguistic markers available in one’s language
• English speakers tend to use relative directions that depend on the location of the speaker (ex. “Go left, walk straight, then turn right)
• • Influences our representation of time (ex. We’ll always arrange pictures in order from left-right, with left indicating the beginning)
• Other languages tend to use absolute terms to give directions (ex. “Go west, walk north, then turn east)
• • They are constantly attending to cardinal directions in their world
• • Influences representation of time (ex. They’ll always arrange pictures from east-west, meaning that the arrangement will differ depending on what direction they’re facing)

Question 15

linguistic relativity: numerical cognition

Answer 15

• One thing that supports the strong Whorfian hypothesis
• Our ability to reason with numbers is influenced by culture → cultures that only have numerical terms for 1 and 2 have difficulty reasoning with numbers greater than 2 (can tell general quantities, like 10 nuts is more than 5 nuts, but can’t reason well with the specific numbers)