Better understanding how the truffles reproduce has major implications for farmers, chefs, and foodies enamored with the expensive, pungent fungus.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Vitalina Rybakova.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
-
Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, April 22, 2008 (sent for review March 30, 2008)
Abstract
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.
Footnotes
- †To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: auskul{at}essex.ac.uk or nisbett{at}umich.edu
-
Author contributions: A.K.U., S.K., and R.E.N. designed research; A.K.U. performed research; A.K.U. analyzed data; and A.K.U., S.K., and R.E.N. wrote the paper.
-
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
- © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders
More Articles of This Classification
Related Content
Cited by...
- Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat
- Moving chairs in Starbucks: Observational studies find rice-wheat cultural differences in daily life in China
- Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes
- Reply to Jacquet et al.: Culture and the neurobiology of norm violation detection
- Higher frequency of social learning in China than in the West shows cultural variation in the dynamics of cultural evolution
- Cultural differences are not always reducible to individual differences
Similar Articles
You May Also be Interested in
PNAS QnAs with NAS foreign associate and metabolic engineer Sang Yup Lee
Researchers report a species of early bird with a combination of bird-like and dinosaur-like bone morphologies, and the structure of the bird’s shoulder girdle highlights the role of developmental plasticity in the early evolution of birds, according to the authors.
A study suggests that the herbicide glyphosate disrupts bee gut microbiota, increasing bees’ susceptibility to pathogens, and that glyphosate’s effects may contribute to the largely unexplained increase in honey bee colony mortality.
Image courtesy of Vivian Abagiu (The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX).
A study finds that a fragment of an ancient retrovirus, integrated in human ancestors before the emergence of Neanderthals, is found more frequently in people who contracted HIV and hepatitis C through intravenous drug use, compared with control populations.
Image courtesty of Pixabay/typographyimages.
