The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

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Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition.

Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach—retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a "middle way." On the other hand, European-American ways, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarizes contradictory perspectives in an effort to determine which fact or position is correct. Five empirical studies showed that dialectical thinking is a form of folk wisdom in Chinese culture: Chinese participants preferred dialectical proverbs containing seeming contradictions more than did American participants. Chinese participants also preferred dialectical resolutions to social conflicts and preferred dialectical arguments over classical Western logical arguments. Furthermore, when 2 apparently contradictory propositions were presented, American participants polarized their views, and Chinese participants were moderately accepting of both propositions. Origins of these cultural differences and their implications for human reasoning in general are discussed.

/pdf/culture-dialectics-and-reasoning-about-contradiction-49xy21sk4b.pdf

Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction.

East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively holistic; that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole. Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object focused and control oriented. In this study East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans were compared on detection of covariation and field dependence. The results showed the following: (a) Chinese participants reported stronger association between events, were more responsive to differences in covariation, and were more confident about their covariation judgments; (b) these cultural differences disappeared when participants believed they had some control over the covariation judgment task; (c) American participants made fewer mistakes on the Rod-and-Frame Test, indicating that they were less field dependent; (d) American performance and confidence, but not that of Asians, increased when participants were given manual control of the test. Possible origins of the perceptual differences are discussed.

/pdf/culture-control-and-perception-of-relationships-in-the-1od542aer9.pdf

Culture, control, and perception of relationships in the environment.

Continental, national and sub-national innovation systems—complementarity and economic growth ☆

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning. More independent Westerners live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals with respect to it. The physical “affordances” of the environment may also influence perception. The built environments of the East are more complex and contain more objects than do those of the West. In addition, artistic products of the East emphasize the field and deemphasize individual objects, including people. Western art renders less of the field and emphasizes individual objects and people.

/pdf/culture-and-point-of-view-2h3j9antde.pdf

Culture and point of view.

/pdf/science-and-civilisation-in-china-2ym8c56ltf.pdf

Science and civilisation in China

1. Approach to Laboratory Work. 2. Measurement and Uncertainty. 3. Statistics of Observation. 4. Scientific Thinking and Experimenting. 5. Experiment Design. 6. Experiment Evaluation. 7. Writing Scientific Reports. Appendix 1. Mathematical Properties of the Gaussian or Normal Distribution. Appendix 2. The Principle of Least Squares. Appendix 3. Difference Tables an the Calculus of Finite Differences. Appendix 4. Specimen Experiment. Bibliography. Answers to Problems. Index.

J. Arol Simpson

Papers

Science and civilisation in China

Experimentation: An Introduction to Measurement Theory and Experimental Design

Space-Charge Flow

Narrow Angle Electron Guns and Cathode Ray Tubes.

Science in the nineteenth century