Integrative Cognitive Style in Middle Eastern and Western Groups

Zebian, Samar; Denny, J. Peter

doi:10.1177/0022022101032001008

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In contrast, Americans' memory for focal objects was independent of the background (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). The holistic pattern of attention was also found among other non-Westem populations such as Russians (Grossmann, 2009;Kiihnen et al, 2001), Central andEastern Europeans (Varnum et al, 2008), and Arabs (Zebian & Denny, 2001). Farming and fishing communities (vs. herding communities; Uskul, Kitayama, & Nisbett, 2008), Orthodox Jews (vs. secular Jews; Vamum et al, 2010), and working-class (vs. middle-class) adults also show a more holistic pattern of attention.…”

Section: The Formation Of Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 78%

Preferences don’t have to be personal: Expanding attitude theorizing with a cross-cultural perspective.

Riemer¹,

Shavitt²,

Koo³

et al. 2014

Psychological Review

147

124

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Attitudes, theorized as behavioral guides, have long been a central focus of research in the social sciences. However, this theorizing reflects primarily Western philosophical views and empirical findings emphasizing the centrality of personal preferences. As a result, the prevalent psychological model of attitudes is a person-centric one. We suggest that incorporating research insights from non-Western sociocultural contexts can significantly enhance attitude theorizing. To this end, we propose an additional model-a normative-contextual model of attitudes. The currently dominant person-centric model emphasizes the centrality of personal preferences, their stability and internal consistency, and their possible interaction with externally imposed norms. In contrast, the normative-contextual model emphasizes that attitudes are always context-contingent and incorporate the views of others and the norms of the situation. In this model, adjustment to norms does not involve an effortful struggle between the authentic self and exogenous forces. Rather, it is the ongoing and reassuring integration of others' views into one's attitudes. According to the normative-contextual model, likely to be a good fit in contexts that foster interdependence and holistic thinking, attitudes need not be personal or necessarily stable and internally consistent and are only functional to the extent that they help one to adjust automatically to different contexts. The fundamental shift in focus offered by the normative-contextual model generates novel hypotheses and highlights new measurement criteria for studying attitudes in non-Western sociocultural contexts. We discuss these theoretical and measurement implications as well as practical implications for health and well-being, habits and behavior change, and global marketing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

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Section: The Formation Of Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 78%

Preferences don’t have to be personal: Expanding attitude theorizing with a cross-cultural perspective.

Riemer¹,

Shavitt²,

Koo³

et al. 2014

Psychological Review

147

124

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Recent work among East Asians (Ji et al 2004) in industrialized societies using the Rod & Frame Test, the Framed Line Test (Kitayama et al 2003), and the Embedded Figures Test again shows Westerners at the field-independent end of the spectrum, compared to field-dependent East Asians, Malays, and Russians (Kuhnen et al 2001). Similarly, Norenzayan et al (2007) found that Canadians showed less field-dependent processing than did Chinese, who in turn were less field-dependent than were Arabs (also see Zebian & Denny 2001). East Asians' recall for objects is worse than Americans' if the background has been switched (Masuda & Nisbett 2001), indicating that East Asians are attending more to the field.…”

Section: Contrast 2: Western 7 Versus Non-western Societiesmentioning

confidence: 96%

The weirdest people in the world?

Henrich¹,

Heine²,

Norenzayan³

2010

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Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers -often implicitly -assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species -frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior -hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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Section: Analytic Versus Holistic Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 91%

Beyond WEIRD: Towards a broad-based behavioral science

Henrich

Heine²,

Norenzayan³

2010

Behav Brain Sci

521

349

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In our response to the 28 (largely positive) commentaries from an esteemed collection of researchers, we (1) consolidate additional evidence, extensions, and amplifications offered by our commentators; (2) emphasize the value of integrating experimental and ethnographic methods, and show how researchers using behavioral games have done precisely this; (3) present our concerns with arguments from several commentators that separate variable “content” from “computations” or “basic processes”; (4) address concerns that the patterns we highlight marking WEIRD people as psychological outliers arise from aspects of the researchers and the research process; (5) respond to the claim that as members of the same species, humans must have the same invariant psychological processes; (6) address criticisms of our telescoping contrasts; and (7) return to the question of explaining why WEIRD people are psychologically unusual. We believe a broad-based behavioral science of human nature needs to integrate a variety of methods and apply them to diverse populations, well beyond the WEIRD samples it has largely relied upon.

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Integrative Cognitive Style in Middle Eastern and Western Groups

Cited by 12 publications

References 36 publications

Preferences don’t have to be personal: Expanding attitude theorizing with a cross-cultural perspective.

Preferences don’t have to be personal: Expanding attitude theorizing with a cross-cultural perspective.

The weirdest people in the world?

Beyond WEIRD: Towards a broad-based behavioral science

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