Uskul Ayse K, Kitayama Shinobu, Nisbett Richard E
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO1 2GP, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jun 24;105(25):8552-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0803874105. Epub 2008 Jun 13.
It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by demonstrations showing that East Asians, who are relatively interdependent, reason and perceive in a more holistic fashion than do Westerners. We examined holistic cognitive tendencies in attention, categorization, and reasoning in three types of communities that belong to the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic regions and yet vary in their degree of social interdependence: farming, fishing, and herding communities in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region. As predicted, members of farming and fishing communities, which emphasize harmonious social interdependence, exhibited greater holistic tendencies than members of herding communities, which emphasize individual decision making and foster social independence. Our findings have implications for how ecocultural factors may have lasting consequences on important aspects of cognition.
有人提出，社会相互依存会促进整体认知，也就是说，会倾向于关注广泛的感知和认知领域，而不是关注某个焦点对象及其属性，并且会倾向于根据关系和相似性进行推理，而不是依据规则和类别。这一假设主要得到了一些论证的支持，这些论证表明，相对相互依存的东亚人比西方人在推理和感知方面更具整体性。我们研究了属于同一国家、地理、民族和语言区域，但社会相互依存程度不同的三种类型社区（土耳其黑海东部地区的农耕、渔业和游牧社区）在注意力、分类和推理方面的整体认知倾向。正如预期的那样，强调和谐社会相互依存的农耕和渔业社区成员比强调个人决策并促进社会独立的游牧社区成员表现出更强的整体倾向。我们的研究结果对于生态文化因素如何可能对认知的重要方面产生持久影响具有启示意义。
