Cultural Psychology Chapter 9-1 (Cognition and Perception)

Cognition & Perception
© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

Chapter Objectives
▪ In this chapter, you will learn how

thinking styles may be fundamentally
different across cultures
▪ You will learn that much of what we
assume to be universal in cognition is
actually relatively recent cultural
development and is concentrated in
industrialized cultures.

Differences in how objects are situated?
Difference in the place of horizon?
The painting by the Flemish

artist Berckheyde (top) and the
one by the Japanese artist
Hokusai (bottom) are both
landscape river scenes.
However, Berckheyde painted

the horizon at a lower level
than did Hokusai. This
difference in style is commonly
found between Western and
Eastern artists.
Cultural Psychology, 2nd Edition
Copyright © 2012 W. W. Norton & Company
Difference in the size of subjects?
The portrait on the right is by a

Chinese painter of the Qing
dynasty.
The subject of the French

portrait occupies a larger
portion of the painting than
do the subjects of the
Chinese portrait. This
difference in style is commonly
found between Western and
Eastern artists.
Interpretation
▪ Masuda, his supervisor Richard Nisbett, and

their colleagues have offered a much bolder
interpretation:
▪ East Asian art looks different from Western art
because people from these cultures are literally
seeing the world differently.
▪ They argue that these different artistic styles
reflect some fundamental differences in basic
cognitive and perceptual processes between
these two cultures (Masuda, Gonzalez et al.,
2008; Nisbett, 2003).
Themes
▪ The exploration of cultural variation in cognition and
perception is guided by the two themes of this book.
First, there are cognitive tools that are universally
available to people; however, as you’ll see, in some of
these studies it appears that these tools are not always
used with the same frequency or for the same purpose.
Second, the cultural differences that do appear in
these basic cognitive and perceptual processes arise
because of the different experiences that people have
growing up in their respective cultures

Taxonomic categorization
•To understand the differences in the painting styles between East Asia and the
West, we need to take a step back.
•First, consider the following question: “Which of these three is least like the other
two?
•A dog, a carrot, and a rabbit.” When answering this question, people typically
give one of two kinds of answers (Chiu, 1972; Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004).
•One common answer is the carrot. Both the dog and the rabbit are animals, so
they share common attributes that differ from the attributes of the carrot, which
is a vegetable.
•This kind of answer reflects a taxonomic categorization strategy in that the
stimuli are grouped according to the perceived similarity of their attributes.
•Taxonomic categorization answers are especially common among Westerners in
these kinds of studies.
Thematic categorization
•The second common answer is the dog.

•Rabbits and carrots go together because rabbits eat carrots.
•Rabbits and carrots have a relationship, which dogs don’t share.
This kind of answer reflects a thematic categorization strategy in
that the stimuli are grouped together on the basis of causal,
temporal, or spatial relationships among them.
•Thematic categorization is especially common among East Asians.
This difference in categorization strategies reflects an underlying
difference in the ways that people attend to their worlds.
•Nisbett and colleagues (Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, &
Norenzayan, 2001) refer to these ways of attending to the world as
analytic and holistic thinking.
Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking
▪ Analytic thinking involves:

• Separating objects from each other
• Breaking down objects into component parts
• Using rules to explain and predict an object’s
behavior
▪ The attributes that make up objects are used as a
basis for categorizing them, and a set of fixed
abstract rules is used to predict and explain
the behavior of these objects.
▪ As we’ll soon see, analytic thinking, in general, is
more common in Western cultures than it is
elsewhere, particularly in East Asia (i.e., China,
Japan, and Korea).
▪ Holistic thinking involves:

• An orientation to the entire scene
• Attending to the relations among objects
• Predicting an object’s behavior on the basis of
those relationships
▪ It represents an associative way of thinking, which
gives attention to the relations among objects and
among the objects and the surrounding context.
▪ Holistic thinking also emphasizes knowledge
gained through experience rather than the
application of fixed abstract rules.
▪ Holistic thinking is more common in East Asian and
other cultures than in Western cultures.
across cultures
▪ In independent cultures, people learn
to think of others as fundamentally
independent from each other.
• Likewise, the physical world can

be understood in the same way.
• Engages in more analytical
thinking.
• They have formal logical system
that searched for the truth.

across cultures
▪ In interdependent cultures, people in collectivistic societies tend to be
socialized in relational contexts and to have their attention directed at
relational concerns.
• This is generalized to an attention of relations among objects in one’s
environment.
• Engages in more holistic thinking.
▪ Some research suggests that holistic thinking is quite widespread
throughout the world and that analytic thinking is the relatively unusual
thinking style in that it is largely restricted to people who have had much
contact with Western society or education systems.
▪ For example, one study found that Arabs showed at least as much evidence of
holistic thinking as Chinese did.
▪ Even within cultures there are parallel differences—working-class Americans
and Russians are more holistic than their middle-class compatriots (Grossman
& Varnum, 2011).

Attention
▪ One of the most fundamental

psychological processes is attention—that
is, at a given time, where one’s cognitive
activity is directed.
▪ analytic thinkers, who tend to perceive the
world as consisting of discrete objects.
▪ holistic thinkers, who tend to perceive the
world as consisting of an interrelated
whole
Rorschach ink blots
▪ In 1949 some European-Americans and Chinese-Americans
were asked to describe what they saw in some Rorschach ink blots
(Abel & Hsu, 1949).
▪ The Rorschach is a projective test in which people report what they
see in an ambiguous stimulus.
▪ The results revealed that these two groups of Americans apparently
saw things quite differently.
▪ The European-Americans were more likely to describe what they
saw based on a single aspect of the card—say, a little blotch on the
bottom that looked like a Ferrari.
▪ In contrast, the Chinese-Americans were more likely to give
“whole-card” responses, describing what they saw based on the
entire image.

▪ It follows that analytic thinkers, who tend to
perceive the world as consisting of discrete
objects, would be more likely to focus their
attention on separate parts of a scene—those
parts that represent discrete objects of interest.
▪ In contrast, holistic thinkers, who tend to
perceive the world as consisting of an
interrelated whole, should direct their attention
more broadly, across an entire scene.

Attention
There are other kinds of tasks for which

holistic thinkers should perform especially
badly.
FIGURE: Rod and frame task. In this task,
the rod and the surrounding frame are
rotated independently.
The frame provides misleading

information about the angle of the rod, so
it is necessary to ignore the frame to
correctly identify the angle of the rod.
People who are high on field
independence can do this task well.
▪ Analytic thinkers tend to show field independence—that
is, they can separate objects from their background
fields.
▪ Holistic thinkers, in contrast, tend to show field
dependence, in that they tend to view objects as bound
to their backgrounds.
▪ Research shows that people’s ability to judge the rod’s
angle while ignoring the frame relates to their general
social orientation. People who attend a lot to others
develop more of an orientation toward the field. Those
who are more outgoing are more field dependent than
people who are more introverted (Witkin, 1969).

▪ Research shows that people’s ability to judge the rod’s
angle while ignoring the frame relates to their general
social orientation.
▪ People who attend a lot to others develop more of an
orientation toward the field. Those who are more
outgoing are more field dependent than people who
are more introverted (Witkin, 1969).
▪ Similarly, farmers who live in societies where they must
coordinate their actions with others are more field
dependent than people who hunt and gather or who
herd animals (Witkin & Berry, 1975).

▪ Likewise, religious training in Calvinism,
which emphasizes the independence of
individuals, leads people to be more field
independent than atheists or people with
training in Catholicism or Judaism (Colzato
et al., 2010; Colzato, van den Wildenberg,
& Hommel, 2008).

▪ People in industrialized societies also tend
to be quite field independent, except for
people living in highly industrialized East
Asia, where clear evidence for field
dependence is found.
▪ That is, in general, East Asians do
relatively poorly on tasks such as the rod
and frame (Ji et al., 2000; Kitayama, Duffy,
Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003).
Masuda & Nisbett (2001)
Field (In)dependence Study
1. American and Japanese participants were shown

some animated computer images of an underwater
scene, complete with swimming fish, waving seaweed,
and floating bubbles.
2. The participants were asked to described what they
saw.
3. The Japanese participants made about 60% more
references to background objects than did the
Americans, who tended to talk more about the fish at
the center of the scene.

4. After the participants had described a number of
these scenes they were then shown some additional
scenes that included the same focal fish they had
seen before.
5. However, some of those fish were presented with the

same background they had appeared in earlier,
whereas other fish were shown with a novel
background. Then, the participants were asked
whether they had seen the fish in the picture before.
Findings
a. American participants recall fish
that they have seen, regardless of
the background against which they
are presented.
b. However, Japanese recall fish

shown with their original
background significantly better
than those shown with a novel
background.
6. When the fish was shown with its
original background the Japanese
were more likely to recognize the
fish than were the Americans.
7. In contrast, when the fish was

shown with a novel background the
Americans were more likely to
recognize the fish than were the
Japanese.
8. It indicates that the Americans
tended to perceive the fish separately
from their background-indeed, their
recall was not influenced by whether
the fish was presented with the
original or a novel background.
9. The Japanese participants, in

contrast, seem to have seen the
fish and the background scenery
as bound together. When the
background is changed, the fish no
longer look quite the same.
What about the eye movement of
Americans and Asians?
Now theses findings raise a big

question.
Are people from different

cultures really seeing things
differently or are they retrieving
different information from their
memories (Masuda, Ellsworth et
al., 2007)?

1. Japanese and American participants
looked at some animated scenes on a
computer.
2. In the scene they saw a target person
in the foreground surrounded by other
people in the background.
3. Each of the people was showing an
emotional facial expression.
4. Sometimes the background faces
showed expressions inconsistent with the
target person (e.g., the target person was
smiling but the background people were
frowning).
5. Sometimes they showed expression
consistent with the target person.
6. The task for the participants was to
identify the emotion the target person was
experiencing.
7. They found that Japanese
judgments of the target person’s
emotional expression were influenced
by the expressions of the people in the
background.
8. In contrast, the expressions of the
background people had no impact on the
judgments of the faces for the Americans.
9. This again provides evidence that
East Asians attend more to the
background context than Westerners
do.

10. In this study, the participants viewed
the scenes while they were connected to
an eye-tracker, so every movement of
their eye was monitored.
11. The test question was whether people
from the two cultures were looking at the
same things.

12. In the first 1,000 milliseconds
there is little cultural difference
(although this difference is
significant). That is, both
Americans and Japanese are
spending more than 90% of the
time looking at the target figure,
with the American percentage a
little higher than the Japanese.

13. In the next two 1,000 millisecond
intervals people in both cultures start
to look a little more at the
background. But this is especially
so for Japanese. Whereas the
Americans are still devoting over
90% of their attention to the central
figure, the Japanese are devoting
somewhere between 70% and 80%.

Conclusion
1. These studies suggest, quite

remarkably, that people from
different cultures are not seeing
the same thing, even when they
are looking at identical scenes.
2. The stimuli perceived by our brains
are different across cultures. Our
eye movements occur largely
outside of our voluntary control,
suggesting just how deeply
these cultural differences in
attention lie.
Conclusion
3. East Asians have been socialized

from such a young age to attend to
relationships that they do
unconsciously by continually
scanning scenes.
4. Westerners, in contrast, have been

socialized to attend to focal objects
and they thus habitually tend to direct
their attention at such objects.

Representative Drawings of
Euro-American and East Asian
Females
Euro-American female East Asian female

Horizons and Context
▪ Comparing Euro-Americans’ and East

Asians’ drawings, East Asian drawings:
• Had higher horizons
• Had 75% more contextual objects in
the scene
▪ Westerners thus seem to represent scenes

differently from East Asians.

Another Reason for This Difference?
This documented difference between East

Asian and Western thinking styles might
stem from other cultural factors in addition to
child rearing.
One possibility is that some landscapes

are so populated with different objects
and contours that they naturally draw
your attention out to the various features
in the background.
1. To investigate this possibility, Japanese and American

landscape scenes were contrasted (Miyamoto et al., 2006).
2. From each country one large city, one medium-sized city,
and one small city were selected.
3. These cities were chosen as each city in a pair was
matched along several dimensions.
4. Then, the researchers went out with cameras to take
pictures of a number of places in those cities; especially,
pictures of hotels and elementary schools.
1. The pictures were taken from identical perspectives

and distances.
2. The pictures were then subjected to a “particle analysis” in
which a computer program outlined the boundary of each
object and counted the number of objects in each scene.

Understanding People’s Behaviors
▪ Analytic thinkers focus on objects’

component parts, whereas holistic thinkers
consider objects’ relations with the context.
• Same distinction is applied to
understanding people.
▪ Based on this differentiation between
analytic thinkers and holistic thinkers,
people generally make two types of
attributions to explain behavior.

Example
▪ Dan, in a store arguing angrily with a shop clerk. You
might very well wonder why Dan is behaving like this.
One way to explain Dan’s behavior would be to consider
his internal characteristics.
▪ For example, perhaps he has a short temper, and his ar
guing is evidence of his sometimes disagreeable
personality.
▪ A second way would be to consider characteristics of the
situation he is in. Perhaps Dan is angry because he
purchased some defective merchandise and the store
clerk is not allowing him to exchange it.
▪ These are two very different ways of explaining the same
behavior.
▪ Trying to understand people’s behavior by considering their inner
characteristics is an extension of an analytic way of thinking.
▪ Analytic thinking involves understanding objects by identifying their
underlying attributes, which is akin to trying to understand people
and their behavior by considering their inner qualities—such as their
personality traits.
▪ In contrast, explaining people’s behavior by considering how the
situation is influencing them is an extension of a holistic way of
thinking.

▪ It requires considering the individual’s relations with his
or her context.
▪ Given what we know about cultural differences in
analytic and holistic ways of thinking, we would expect
Westerners to be more likely to explain people’s
behaviors in terms of their underlying dispositions (i.e.,
they will make dispositional attributions) and East
Asians—and perhaps people from other cultural
backgrounds as well—to be more likely to explain
people’s behaviors in terms of contextual variables (i.e.,
they will make situational attributions)

▪ Explaining people’s behaviors by

attending to their personal
characteristics is known as a
dispositional attribution (e.g., one
student is late to class. Why?)
▪ Explaining people’s behaviors by

attending to contextual variable is a
situational attribution (e.g., one
student is late to class. Why?)
▪ Research with Westerners

consistently finds that they attend
more to dispositional rather than
contextual information when
explaining others’ behaviors.

The Fundamental Attribution Error
▪ Imagine that before reading an essay

that you are told that the writer has
been instructed to write with a
perspective that was to be used in a
debate- that is, those who wrote
pro-Castro essays had been told to write
an essay defending Castro whereas
those who wrote anti-Castro essays had
been told to write an essay criticizing
Castro.
▪ You are 100% sure that the essay tells

us nothing about the writer’s true
attitudes.
▪ American students were asked to

evaluate the essay writer’s true
attitudes by reading his/her essay
espousing either positive or critical
attitudes towards Fidel Castro (Jones &
Harris, 1967).
▪ Participants assumed that the writer

of the pro-Castro essay felt more
positively toward Castro than the
writer of the anti-Castro essay.

▪ Regardless of the additional conditions

with explicit situational constraints.
▪ This is termed the “fundamental
attributions error.”
▪ One study explored how “fundamental”

the fundamental attribution error is by
examining it cross-culturally—in India
(Miller, 1984).
▪ Participants (8 years old to adult) were

asked to described a situation when
someone had behaved in either a
prosocial manner or a deviant manner,
and then to explain why the person
had behaved that way.

▪ American and Indian 8-year-olds gave

similar attributions.
▪ Older Americans made more
dispositional attributions, but not
situational ones 🡪 fundamental
attribution error
▪ Older Indians made more situational
attributions but not dispositional
ones 🡪 reverse fundamental
attribution error

Cultural Psychology
Second Edition
Steven J. Heine
Reasoning Styles

Which flower, A or B, is most
similar to those in Group 1 (2)?
Reasoning Style
As suggested before, analytic and holistic thinking also
affects one’s reasoning and categorization.
Reasoning Style
1. If you are to make the decision
based on the application of an
abstract rule, then you would
conclude that Flower A goes with
Group 2 and Flower B goes with
Group 1.
2. The reason is that the only
characteristic that consistently
distinguishes the flowers in
Groups 1 and 2 is the shape of the
stems.
3. All the flowers in Group 1 have a
curved stem whereas all the flowers
in Group 2 have a straight stem.
Reasoning Style
1. In contrast, if you were to base your
decision on the similarity of the target
flowers to the groups you would have
reached a different conclusion.
2. Flower A is more similar to most of the
flowers in Group 1 because most of the
flowers in that group have round
petals, have one leaf, and have only
one circle.
3. Likewise, Flower B is more similar overall
to the flowers in Group 2. However,
none of those features characterize all
the flowers in the group so these
similarities do not become rules.
Reasoning Style
▪ As suggested before, analytic and holistic
thinking also affects one’s reasoning and
categorization.
▪ Analytic thinkers find a rule and apply it;
thus:
• Group 2 🡪 Flower A because all have
straight stems
• Group 1 🡪 Flower B because all have
curved stems
Reasoning Style
▪ Holistic thinkers find general
resemblance and relationship between
multiple aspects, thus:
• Group 1 🡪 Flower A because most
have round petals, one leaf, one
circle
• Group 2 🡪 Flower B because most
have spiked petals, no leaves, two
circles
Tolerance for Contradiction
1. The darkness of the night will yield to

the brightness of the day, which will lead
to the darkness again, and the cycle will
continue to repeat.
2. To shrink something, you need to
expand it first.
3. To abolish something, you need to
flourish it first.
4. To take something, you need to give it
first.
▪ One kind of reasoning related to

holistic thinking may have come from
China.
• Naïve dialecticism = relative

acceptance for contradictions
• Based on a view that everything
is connected and is constantly
in flux—symbolized by the yin (the
moon) and the yang (the sun)
• Universe moves back and forth
between opposite poles
Which One Is True? A, B, or A
&B
▪ Consider the following two arguments:
A: A sociologist who surveyed college students from 100

universities claimed that a high correlation exists among
college female students who smoke and who are skinny
(smoking leads to weight loss).
B: A biologist who studied nicotine addiction asserted that

heavy doses of nicotine often lead to becoming
overweight (smoking leads to weight gain).
▪ These attitudes extend to other domains as

well:
• Attitudes toward the self
» East Asians likelier than Westerners
to offer contradictory self-descriptions
(e.g. both shy and outgoing)
• Predicting future trends

» Westerners likelier to view the future
as unfolding in a linear way from
the past, while East Asians see the
future in a more cyclical form
Creative Thinking
▪ Aside from analytic and holistic thinking, one additional way of thinking has received much
attention across cultures.
▪ Much of the cross-cultural study of creativity has contrasted Westerners and East Asians.
Some have noted that by certain measures of creativity, Westerners seem to fare better: For
example, Nobel Prizes have been disproportionately awarded to people in Western cultures
(Switzerland is the per capita leader), and relatively few have gone to people in East Asian
countries, particularly China (Kanazawa, 2006; but note that Chinese scientific innovations
arguably led the world in the 15th century; Needham, 1956).
▪ Likewise, some have argued that Asian art, in comparison with Western art, tends to be more
about mastering the techniques of a model rather than producing original works and that
Asians have excelled more in genres such as classical music in which disciplined
reproduction is prioritized ahead of novelty (Morris & Leung, 2010; Yoshihara, 2007).
▪ Socratic learning styles that originated in Greece put more emphasis on self-discovery
compared with Confucian styles of learning that emphasized the mastery of material.

Creativity compare across
cultures
▪ Creativity is the generation of ideas that are both (a) novel and (b) useful
and appropriate (Amabile, 1983).
▪ Both of these components are necessary to be considered creative.
▪ For example, a hammer made out of Jell-O would certainly be novel, but it
wouldn’t be useful in any meaningful sense. And a useful hammer might be
one made with a steel head attached to a wooden handle, but it wouldn’t be
novel if it was the same as the one in your toolbox.
▪ A creative hammer would have to be useful but in a novel way. When you
separate creativity into these two separate components, cultural comparisons
become more nuanced.
▪ In general, the generation of novel ideas appears to be facilitated by
individualism, and Westerners, accordingly, appear to generate more ideas
than East Asians.
▪ Westerners prefer novel objects more than East Asians do they generate a
larger number of ideas when they are primed with individualistic thoughts
than collectivistic ones

Creativity in collectivists culture
▪ Good creative ideas involve novel solutions that are appropriate for the problems
at hand. Collectivism appears to be associated with the generation of useful
rather than novel ideas (Erez & Nouri, 2010).
▪ 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.
▪ This orientation toward finding practical solutions that can fit within an existing
set of social concerns appears to lead to skills for creating useful ideas more
generally.
▪ For example finding of a research showed when Singaporeans were working
with another person, they elaborated more on the appropriateness of their
ideas than when they were by themselves, yet they became less original in their
ideas. In contrast, Israelis were not affected by the presence of others in the
same way.
▪ In another study, Dutch participants who were motivated to do their best on a
brainstorming task came up with more original, but not more useful, ideas
compared with those who were not motivated to do their best.
▪ In contrast, when Korean participants were especially motivated, they came up
with more useful ideas, but not more original ones.
Conclusion
▪ In sum, there are two key components of creative ideas, novelty and
usefulness, and individualistic and collectivistic cultures encourage these
two differently. Perhaps, then, the optimal creative team would include both
people from individualistic and collectivistic cultures so that they could
capitalize on their respective strengths.
▪ Supporting this, the most creative ideas in one study were found when team
members were primed with both individualistic and collectivistic ideas
(Bechtoldt, Choi, & Nijstad, 2012), and the most creative ideas in another
study emerged when people were exposed to aspects of multiple cultures
(Leung & Chiu, 2010).
▪ Multicultural environments may indeed have an advantage for producing
more creative ideas.

Talking and Thinking
▪ Having a spoken language is one key way

that humans differ from other species, and
language has been argued to be, in part,
responsible for humans’ impressive
cultural achievements.
▪ However, there is more to the story than
just that humans talk.
▪ We also need to consider why humans
talk and the consequences of talking.
▪ Often, students of Asian background speak up less in
class than those of other cultural backgrounds (Tweed &
Lehman, 2002).
▪ This relative silence is often viewed as a cause for
concern and tends to be perceived by professors and
other students as shyness or even a lack of interest in
the class.
▪ Drawing these kinds of inferences reveals an assumption
that talking reflects thinking and engagement in
class.

▪ Heejung Kim (2002), however, argues that
this assumption about talking is very much
grounded in Western cultural practices,
and that talking can affect people from
different cultures in quite different ways.
▪ Talking and language have held a
privileged position in much of Western
intellectual history

▪ In Judeo-Christian beliefs the “Word” was
viewed as sacred because of its divine
power to create.
▪ Within the United States the freedom to
speak one’s mind is a birthright,
protected by the First Amendment to the
Constitution.
▪ Speaking is valued in the West because it
is viewed as an act of self-expression and
as inextricably bound to thought.
▪ In contrast, however, in many East Asian cultural
traditions there has been considerably less emphasis on
talking, if not outright suspicion of the spoken word.
▪ Lao Tzu wrote, “He who knows does not speak. He who
speaks does not know.”
▪ Practitioners of many Eastern religions pursue truth
through silent meditation rather than through spoken
prayer. And as a Korean proverb states, “An empty cart
makes more noise.”
▪ In many ways, Eastern cultural traditions have not
cultivated a belief that thought and speech are closely
related.
Explicit Versus Implicit
Communication
▪ Although nonverbal communication is a big part of communication in all cultures, there
are some rather pronounced cultural differences in the degree to which communication
relies on explicit verbal information versus more implicit nonverbal cues.
▪ In explaining these cultural differences, Edward Hall (1976) made a distinction
between high-context and low-context cultures.
▪ In a high-context culture, people are deeply involved with each other, and this
involvement leads them to have much shared information that guides their behavior.
There are clear and appropriate ways of behaving in each situation, and this
information is widely shared and understood so it does not 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, and thus they can be less explicit
in what they say.
▪ In contrast, in a low-context culture there is relatively less involvement among
individuals, and there is less shared information to guide behavior. As a result, 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.
▪ East Asian cultures are good examples of high-context cultures, whereas North
American, and English-speaking cultures more generally, are good examples of
low-context ones.
Language and
Communication Styles:
▪ Verbal Communication: Different cultures often have distinct
communication styles, including the use of language, tone, and
nonverbal cues. High-context cultures may rely more on implicit
communication, while low-context cultures prioritize explicit verbal
expression.
▪ Nonverbal Communication: Gestures, facial expressions, and
body language can vary widely across cultures. What may be
considered a polite gesture in one culture might have a different
meaning or be absent in another. In many non-Western cultures,
nonverbal cues, such as body language, facial expressions, and
tone of voice, play a significant role in communication. Silence and
pauses may carry meaning.
▪ Cognitive Styles: Cross-cultural psychology explores variations in
cognitive styles, such as whether individuals from certain cultures
are more inclined towards holistic or analytic thinking. Holistic
thinking emphasizes context and relationships, while analytic
▪ Cultural Schemas: Cultural schemas or mental frameworks shape
how individuals perceive and interpret information. These schemas
are influenced by cultural norms, values, and social experiences.
▪ Direct vs. Indirect Communication: Some cultures value direct
and explicit communication, while others prefer indirect and nuanced
expressions. Misunderstandings may arise when individuals from
different cultural backgrounds interpret communication styles
differently.
▪ Politeness and Face Saving: The concept of face-saving,
maintaining one's dignity or honor, is culturally influenced. Some
cultures prioritize politeness and indirect language to preserve face,
while others may value directness.

▪ Problem-Solving Approaches: The way individuals approach
problem-solving can be influenced by cultural norms. Some cultures
may emphasize collaborative problem-solving, while others may
prioritize individual initiative.
▪ Decision-Making Styles: Cultural influences play a role in
decision-making processes, with variations in the importance given
to individual autonomy, group consensus, or authority figures.
▪ Power Distance: The degree of acceptance of hierarchical
authority, known as power distance, can influence communication
dynamics and decision-making within a culture.

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Cultural Psychology Chapter 9-1 (Cognition and Perception)

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Cultural Psychology Chapter 9-1 (Cognition and Perception)

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Cognition & Perception

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

▪ In this chapter, you will learn how

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

The painting by the Flemish

However, Berckheyde painted

The portrait on the right is by a

The subject of the French

▪ Masuda, his supervisor Richard Nisbett, and

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

•The second common answer is the dog.

▪ Analytic thinking involves:

▪ Holistic thinking involves:

• Likewise, the physical world can

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

▪ One of the most fundamental

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

There are other kinds of tasks for which

The frame provides misleading

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

1. American and Japanese participants were shown

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

5. However, some of those fish were presented with the

b. However, Japanese recall fish

7. In contrast, when the fish was

9. The Japanese participants, in

Now theses findings raise a big

Are people from different

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

1. These studies suggest, quite

3. East Asians have been socialized

4. Westerners, in contrast, have been

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

Euro-American female East Asian female

▪ Comparing Euro-Americans’ and East

▪ Westerners thus seem to represent scenes

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

This documented difference between East

One possibility is that some landscapes

1. To investigate this possibility, Japanese and American

1. The pictures were taken from identical perspectives

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

▪ Analytic thinkers focus on objects’

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company

▪ Explaining people’s behaviors by

▪ Explaining people’s behaviors by

▪ Research with Westerners

© 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company