Bailenson Jeremy N, Shum Michael S, Atran Scott, Medin Douglas L, Coley John D
Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93101-9660, USA.
Cognition. 2002 May;84(1):1-53. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00011-2.
Many psychological studies of categorization and reasoning use undergraduates to make claims about human conceptualization. Generalizability of findings to other populations is often assumed but rarely tested. Even when comparative studies are conducted, it may be challenging to interpret differences. As a partial remedy, in the present studies we adopt a 'triangulation strategy' to evaluate the ways expertise and culturally different belief systems can lead to different ways of conceptualizing the biological world. We use three groups (US bird experts, US undergraduates, and ordinary Itza' Maya) and two sets of birds (North American and Central American). Categorization tasks show considerable similarity among the three groups' taxonomic sorts, but also systematic differences. Notably, US expert categorization is more similar to Itza' than to US novice categorization. The differences are magnified on inductive reasoning tasks where only undergraduates show patterns of judgment that are largely consistent with current models of category-based taxonomic inference. The Maya commonly employ causal and ecological reasoning rather than taxonomic reasoning. Experts use a mixture of strategies (including causal and ecological reasoning), only some of which current models explain. US and Itza' informants differed markedly when reasoning about passerines (songbirds), reflecting the somewhat different role that songbirds play in the two cultures. The results call into question the importance of similarity-based notions of typicality and central tendency in natural categorization and reasoning. These findings also show that relative expertise leads to a convergence of thought that transcends cultural boundaries and shared experiences.
许多关于分类和推理的心理学研究利用本科生来对人类概念化做出论断。研究结果对其他人群的可推广性常常是被假定的，但很少得到检验。即使进行了比较研究，解读差异也可能具有挑战性。作为一种部分补救措施，在本研究中我们采用一种“三角测量策略”来评估专业知识和文化上不同的信仰体系如何能够导致对生物世界进行概念化的不同方式。我们使用三组人群（美国鸟类专家、美国本科生和普通的伊察玛雅人）以及两组鸟类（北美鸟类和中美洲鸟类）。分类任务显示出三组人群的分类排序之间有相当大的相似性，但也存在系统性差异。值得注意的是，美国专家的分类与伊察玛雅人的分类比与美国新手的分类更相似。在归纳推理任务中差异被放大，在这些任务中只有本科生表现出与当前基于类别的分类推理模型基本一致的判断模式。玛雅人通常采用因果和生态推理而非分类推理。专家们使用多种策略（包括因果和生态推理），而当前模型只能解释其中一些策略。在对雀形目鸟类（鸣禽）进行推理时，美国和伊察玛雅人的信息提供者有显著差异，这反映了鸣禽在两种文化中所扮演的角色略有不同。这些结果对基于相似性的典型性和中心趋势概念在自然分类和推理中的重要性提出了质疑。这些发现还表明，相对的专业知识会导致超越文化界限和共同经历的思维趋同。
