Culture and Thinking

Box 7.1. Beliefs, values and social practices shape how people think, illustrated by a study comparing American and Asian students shown the same underwater scene for a brief period and then asked to describe what they saw. American students tended to focus on the largest, brightest or most prominent object (for instance, naming the biggest fish and where it was swimming) — a pattern the researchers called analytical thinking, where each object tends to be processed somewhat separately from its surroundings. Asian students (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) tended instead to describe the relationship between objects and their background (for instance, noting that the water was green or the bottom was rocky) — a pattern called holistic thinking, where objects are processed together with the context around them.

The comparison illustrates that thinking is not a culture-free process — the cultural environment a person grows up in can influence which features of a scene get noticed and described first. …