Richard E. Nisbett - US grants

When making a choice among objects or alternative courses of action, people often feel it is useful to seek out direct encounters with the objects or alternatives, even when these are costly. For example, people routinely interview job candidates and applicants for college and professional school. Conversely, people sometimes do not seek out or heavily weight reputational evidence, based on other people's views, even when these are readily obtainable. There is some empirical evidence, however, as well as a theoretical argument deriving from the Law of Large Numbers, indicating that one's personal samples of objects, particularly when these are based on only a small amount of evidence, may sometimes be poorly predictive of one's ultimate evaluations. Conversely, other people's samples, particularly if these are based on a large amount of evidence, may sometimes be highly predictive of one's evaluations. The proposed research will extend the available evidence on the question of predictability of one's ultimate evaluations of objects. It is anticipated that small personal samples of complex objects (e.g., interviews) will in general provide a relatively poor basis for evaluations, while reputational evidence about the objects, especially if based on a large number of people with a large amount of experience, will in general provide a relatively good basis for evaluations. People's beliefs about predictability of evaluations will also be studied. The anticipation is that people will in general overestimate the stability of their own small sample evaluations and underestimate the utility of other people's large sample evaluations. The exact nature of people's beliefs will be a guide as to how to educate people to make maximum use of evidence for effective social judgments and choices. The work is relevant to mental health in that it represents basic work on social cognition--that is, how people make use of evidence about complex social objects. It has direct relevance to the work of mental health professionals whose jobs consist in good part of making social judgments on the basis of evidence of varying kinds. The present work will speak to the utility of the kinds of evidence used by professionals.

The classical view of reasoning holds that people solve problems by applying formal inferential rules such as the syntactic rules of deductive logic. Evidence based on previous work by Nisbett, Cheng, and Holyoak shows that people typically do not reason using such rules; instead, they use what they term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are clusters of abstract rules organized according to goals and conditions of applicability. The pragmatic schemas studied so far include regulation schemas, such as permissions and obligations, and a qualitative version of the law of large numbers. Teaching such abstract pragmatic schemas improved reasoning, both immediately following training and after a delay of a week or two, whereas teaching formal rules did not improve reasoning, even immediately following training (or, in other studies, improved reasoning immediately, but the improvement decayed rapidly). One plausible explanation is that pragmatic rules are organized according to the conditions under which they apply, and therefore can be applied and practiced once they are learned. In contrast, formal rules do not specify conditions of applicability and therefore are difficult to apply. The first set of experiments will extend the pragmatic schema approach to the evaluation of evidence on cause-and-effect relations. The first experiment will test whether people use pragmatic rather than formal rules in evaluating causal relations. It will also investigate the reasons for common fallacies about causal relations. The second experiment will measure the effectiveness of current graduate training on causal reasoning in psychology and chemistry. Psychology students are exposed to a wider range of causal relations than chemistry students, and therefore should be more accurate in classifying events according to the type of causal relation involved. The third experiment will test whether causal reasoning can be taught effectively by abstract means, as predicted by the pragmatic hypothesis. The second set of experiments will extend the study of the duration of training effects of formal and pragmatic rules. Pragmatic training will include rules on obligations and causal relations. The third set of experiments will examine whether it is the naturalness or the pragmatic nature of the rules that lead to effective training. The last study will evaluate a new course on reasoning based on pragmatic rules. This research will lead to the development of instructions on reasoning more effective than training in formal logic. The new instructions, being theoretically based, will be more systematic as well as more general than the case-based methodnow prevalent in law, medical, and graduate schools. The instructions will cover reasoning on social regulations, explanation of variability based on the law of large numbers, and the evaluation of evidence in accepting or rejecting scientific hypotheses.

This proposal outlines an interdisciplinary traineeship program for the study of cognition and environmental contexts. The program brings together psychologist, anthropologists, and other social scientists who are interested in the scientific study of graduate students who will be knowledgeable about both methods and theory in both anthropology and cognitive science. The innovative structural components include psychology, participation in interdisciplinary research seminars meeting weekly throughout their graduate careers and participation in research at several field sites and collaborative research installations already established in locations in many parts of the world by University of Michigan scientists. the students trained by such a program are expected by be uniquely qualified to develop a scientific understanding of cultural aspects of cognitive structures and processes.

A program of experiments will examine the "culture of honor" reputed to exist both in the southern United States and in parts of the western United States initially settled by southerners. In cultures of honor, men are expected to defend their reputations for strength and toughness by responding forcefully, and with violence if necessary, when these are impugned. Insults and reactions to insults constitute a key social dynamic in such cultures. An unretracted insult must be punished if the target is to retain his "honor," that is, his credibility as a powerful agent who can deter more genuine threats to his well-being and livelihood. Experiments are expected to show the southerner's greater sensitivity to insults, as indicated by various measures of aggressiveness and desire to display toughness. The research is also expected to show that southerners mutually enforce standards of "honor" by withdrawing respect from the person who, when affronted, fails to do anything about it. Finally, southerners are expected to have a wider variety of means of preventing and reducing conflict, because conflict places them at more risk than it does others. Conflict avoidance techniques are only sometimes effective in preventing violence, however. The research is expected to show that, if provoked beyond a certain point, southerners will express anger later than northerners, but more explosively. Thousands of people are killed every year in the context of arguments and conflicts; and tens of thousands more are severely injured as the result of similar conflicts and as a result of spouse and child abuse. Much of this violence is the result of perceived affronts. It is important to know what sorts of situations create a sense of affront and provoke violence in different subcultures, what psychological mechanisms mediate between perceived affront and violence, what sorts of norms, sanctioned in what ways, sustain the norms allowing violence, and what social behaviors serve to avoid or reduce conflict. In addition to its theoretical and methodological contributions, this program of research will make pragmatic contributions by providing answers to the foregoing questions.

This project will investigate the contention of scholars in many fields that East Asians and people who are products of European culture reason differently. East Asians are held to reason holistically, attending to the `field` or context in which objects are embedded and attributing causality to interactions between the object (person, animal, or thing) and the field. Also, there is no tradition of formal logic in East Asia; instead there is a preference for `dialectical` reasoning in which opposing facts or points of view are resolved. Europeans are held to be analytic, attempting to discern properties of the object and attributing causality to such properties. Formal logic plays a role in reasoning and is used to create general laws about the behavior of objects based on their category memberships. Preliminary research provides some support for these hypotheses. For example, Americans tend to explain the behavior of people by referring exclusively to personality traits, whereas East Asians understand the same behavior in terms of the social context. East Asians are less likely to use categories in making inductive inferences, for example, to spontaneously think of `mammals` when asked to generalize from one animal to another. East Asians more accurately detect covariation among arbitrary stimulus events in the environment, such as those presented in different locations on a computer screen. Asian students like dialectic proverbs, that is, those involving a contradiction, and prefer dialectic to linear arguments. This project will build on the preliminary findings by examining 1) the tendency to classify objects using categories based on formal rules vs. memory for similar objects; 2) the ability to detect relationships among features of an object vs. ability to detect covariation among events in the field; 3) the degree to which attention is paid to the object vs. the field; 4) the degree to which causal attribution for events is to the object vs. to the field; and 5) the ability to learn and use abstract rules for reasoning. Participants will be Americans studied in the U.S., and Chinese studied in the U. S. and China. Additional work will study the social factors which presumably underlie the cultural differences: the prediction is that attention to the social field with be associated with holistic reasoning style within both cultural groups. Results are expected to raise serious questions about the universality of cognitive processes commonly regarded as basic and to suggest that psychologists may not have correctly identified the `fault lines` of cognition. For example, the importance of categories and formal inductive and deductive rules may be less great than generally presumed. The results can also be expected to suggest that there may be different styles of learning that should be taken into consideration when teaching members of different groups; and to provide evidence that cultural diversity of work groups has advantages for problem-solving. Finally, the results are relevant to understanding interaction between Asians and Americans in business and government contexts: The two groups are likely to have different and potentially conflicting understandings of the motives underlying behavior.

In previous research, the PI found that people of European culture tend to perceive and reason in a relatively analytic way; they focus their attention on an object, categorize it on the basis of its attributes, and apply rules to predict and explain its behavior. East Asians perceive and reason in a relatively holistic way; they attend to the object and the context simultaneously, they are attentive to relationships among events, and they predict and explain behavior on the basis of presumed relationships between object and context. Compared to East Asian participants, Western participants a) notice less about the context, b) are less skilled at detecting covariation among events, c) find it easier to separate objects from the contexts in which they are embedded, d) are more likely to mistakenly attribute behavior exclusively to the object while ignoring the role of contextual factors, e) are less susceptible to the hindsight bias (the "I-knew-it-all-along" error), f) more likely to organize objects and events in terms of rules and categories as opposed to relationships and similarities, and g) are more likely to apply logical rules to problems describing everyday situations. The origins of these differences probably lie in the different social systems characteristic of East and West. We find that Asian Americans resemble European Americans more than they do Asians. The proposed research will explore the breadth of the perceptual differences, including whether they extend to audition and whether they influence learning processes; the depth of the perceptual differences, including how controllable vs. automatic they are, whether they result in different perceptual illusions for Easterners and Westerners, and whether they include differences in peripheral vision capacity; how unified the perceptual differences are; whether individual differences in perception are related to individual differences in cognition; and how social factors affect perceptual and cognitive functioning. The research is expected to indicate that educational practices that benefit holistic thinkers may not be the same ones that benefit analytic thinkers; that "culture fair" ability testing may be an illusory goal; and that perceptual and thinking styles are sufficiently different that ethnic diversity in work groups is likely to improve problem-solving.

Recent work by Nisbett and his colleagues has demonstrated marked differences between Westerners and East Asians in a number of aspects of perception and reasoning. Westerners perceive and reason in ways that can be described as analytic. They tend to focus on some salient object, identify its attributes, categorize the object, and apply rules to model and explain the object's behavior, and the rules employed include formal logic. In contrast, East Asians perceive and reason in ways that can be called holistic. They tend to focus on the broad field in which an object is located and the relation between the object and the field. Relationships and similarities are used to organize the world, and dialectical reasoning (for example, seeking the middle way between extremes) substitutes for formal logic. The aim of this research is to establish that a particular broad aspect of culture, namely the degree of individualism vs. collectivism characteristic of a group, is a source of the cognitive differences. Westerners are independent and individualistic and they consequently have the luxury of focusing on some object with respect to which they have a goal, whereas Easterners are more interdependent and collectivist and must attend to the complicated social worlds they live in. Differences in attention, causal attribution, organization of objects and events, and reasoning derive from these differences. The proposed research measures social orientation toward individualism vs. collectivism. The anticipation is that social orientation, and not some other factor associated with differences between Westerners and Asians, will produce the relationship between culture and cognition. In order to demonstrate that social orientation influences cognitive differences, the research will examine subcultures within the West (such as northern vs. southern Italy, eastern vs. western Europe, American Catholics vs. Protestants, working class vs. middle class) which differ in social orientation. The subcultures are expected to differ in aspects of that are considered to be analytic vs. holistic. The research is relevant to a wide range of social issues, most notably in education. The research may uncover ways in which more analytic people can be taught useful aspects of holistic thinking and more holistic people can be taught useful aspects of analytic ways of thinking.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We test three main hypotheses: (1) older people are more interdependent than younger people and (2) as a consequence, they become more holistic in cognition, and (3) in part as a result of more holistic thinking, they become wiser in some respects. We will sample people aged 20-79. We will study American and Japanese participants on tests measuring independent/interdependent social orientation including characteristics of each participant's social network, perceived social support, and various indirect indicators such as sensitivity to vocal tone. To test whether greater interdependence within age groups is associated with more holistic thinking, we will assess several facets of holistic cognition including attention to context, causal attribution, logical vs. dialectic reasoning, recognition of uncertainty, and context-dependent learning. More holistic people, as compared to more analytic people: attend to context more broadly, more clearly recognize the role of situations in producing behavior and have more complex views of causality, look for the middle way in disputes and evaluation of contradictory propositions, are more cognizant of uncertainty and change, and show larger context- dependent learning effects. We anticipate that greater age will prove to be associated with more holistic cognition for Americans, who become increasingly more interdependent as they age. We anticipate that the aging effect on cognition will be less for Japanese, who probably increase less in interdependence as they age. We will draw random samples from one middle-class area and one working-class area of both the United States and Japan. We will measure health, socioeconomic status, crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. These measures will be used to gauge comparability of samples in the U.S. and Japan and to determine their relation to interdependence and holistic vs. analytic cognition. Thus this application examines the long-held folk belief that with age, we become wiser, and evaluates the hypothesis that much of what westerners call "wisdom" is similar to holistic processing of information. Holistic processing of information is fostered by interdependence with other people, which is more characteristic of the elderly. The research will shed light on how social relationships change with age, how the nature of social relationships influences thinking, and how certain kinds of cognition encourage wise thinking. [unreadable] [unreadable] Public Health Relevance: The research will shed light on how social relationships change with age, how the nature of social relationships influences thinking, and how certain kinds of cognition encourage wise thinking. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]