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Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, April 22, 2008 (received 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
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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.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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↵§ For lack of a better word, we use the term “fishermen” to refer to both male and female participants in the sample recruited in fishing villages.
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↵¶ This procedure was repeated for one of the two tasks first for nine different combinations of lines and squares of which the first three were practice, with only the remaining critical six trials used for analyses. Participants were then given another set of three practice trials and six critical trials for the other task. The order of the two tasks was counterbalanced.
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↵‖ The statistical analyses for all measures are based on planned contrasts between herders, on the one hand, and farmers and fishers, on the other hand.
- © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders
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