Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition.

  title={Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition.},
  author={Richard E. Nisbett and Kaiping Peng and Incheol Choi and Ara Norenzayan},
  journal={Psychological review},
  volume={108 2},
The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit… Expand
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