Does your cultural or ethnic background shape the way you think?
This past July, groups of Chinese-Canadian and Euro-Canadian undergraduate students participated in a research test conducted by the Human Development and Applied Psychology department at U of T to answer this question.
Graduate students Caroline Ho and Georges Potworowski, under the supervision of Professor Keith Stanovich, led the project entitled “Cultural and Individual Differences in Rational Thinking.”
Ho and Potworowski started from the basic presumption that “above and beyond how smart you are in general, there are thinking dispositions that predict sometimes how normative or non-normative your thinking is,” explained Ho. Normative, according to Stanovich, refers to the “optimal” level of reasoning the human brain is capable of.
According to theory, two people can be equally smart, but might not reason at the same level due to individual differences. One person for example might have a tendency to accept expert opinions at face value, or to use quick but inaccurate approximation strategies to escape difficult problems.
Ho explained that the purpose of her study was to discover if, “in addition to these individual differences, are there any cultural differences between how people think?”
They searched for such differences between people of Chinese descent and people of European descent.
The results have yet to be completely analyzed, but, as she explains, “we didn’t find all the differences that we expected to find…the interesting thing is that people took a very different route in getting to the same point…so even though across a number of different problems people tended to reason just as well in both cultures, they displayed differences in their thinking dispositions.”
The study found that Chinese students tend to be more dialectical in their thinking. They seek out and try to integrate contradictory information from opposing sides of an issue. Ho explains this may be because “in the Taoist tradition, the idea is that things are constantly changing…and because things are changing there is an aspect of truth in everything around you.” Chinese people are taught to expect contradiction, so they learn to tolerate and even embrace it.
Ho explains that Western science, embracing the thesis-antithesis methodology, “is supposed to be the epitome of dialectical thinking.” Her conclusions indicate that this may just be a prescriptive ideal, generally only practiced by western scientists. The average Euro-Canadian is more likely to favour choosing one piece of contradictory data over the other.
Ho explains the importance of this study: “We, and many other researchers, think that cognitive ability is fixed, you’re born with it…but thinking dispositions, the style with which you approach information, can be learned.” The results of this study may be able to help people from different cultures learn to improve their reasoning strategies by using methods from another perspective.
If you would like to participate in this study, are of Chinese ethnic background, and in your third or fourth year of undergraduate studies, please contact [email protected].
