6.3 Cognitive style and cultural values.

From an ethnocentric Western perspective logical, analytical and rational reasoning skills are highly valued and are assumed to be ubiquitous. If not present in other cultures the lack of reasoning skills is interpreted as a cognitive deficit. Globalization has undoubtedly promoted this perspective in nearly all modern industrial societies although not everywhere. For example in some agrarian societies an understanding of the whole is emphasized, and collective decision-making is promoted, rather than a promotion of analytic skills (Berry, 1988; Serpell, 1993). It should be obvious that psychological instruments developed to test cognitive achievements in Western societies would have little validity in agrarian cultures. Valid assessments should rather be developed based of culturally relevant values of cognition.

The emphasis on cultural values has produced collateral interest in differences in cognitive style between East Asian and Western students (Nisbett, 2003). Some support has been found for cultural differences in cognition as East Asian students tend to see the whole as more salient, and perceive and remember objects as being more interconnected than Western students. In a study comparing Chinese with European American students Ji, Zhang, and Nisbett (2004) found that the Chinese students organized pictorial stimuli more in relational terms using less categorical descriptions when compared to the European American participants. It seems clear from these studies that cognitive skills must be evaluated according to the criteria of a given cultural group, and not on some invariant universal basis. On the other hand as noted previously globalization may well remove the need for the study of cultural relativism over the long term.

The most basic reason for studying the relationship between culture and cognition is the belief that a given population group share common values that are persuasive in behavior and thought processes. Populations can be compared on cognitive tasks and the differences found be inferred to be the result of cultural modes of being. The rationale for such comparative studies is the belief that societies provide members with common and coherent ways of knowing that are reflected in cognition. Nisbett and Masuda (2003) compared societies thought to have evolved from Greek philosophical traditions with those of East Asian origin. Eco-cultural psychology is based on cross-cultural comparisons where differences derive from cultural values that produce consistency in behavior, motivation and explanations for behavior. In this manner psychological processes are related to the underlying socio-cultural and environmental context of these cultural groups.

These persuasive cultural ways of thinking have also been referred to in the literature as cognitive styles. A direct contribution of culture to cognition is the development of processors of information that lead to consistent ways of perceiving and categorizing information. Typically, cognitive styles are viewed from a bipolar perspective where the extreme ends of these poles produce distinctive ways of thinking and behaving. The most frequently research domain is on what has been called field dependent and field independent cognition (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007).