Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-5cf477f64f-54txb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-08T10:17:37.830Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

47 - Reasoning across Cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Russell C. Burnett  and
Douglas L. Medin
Edited by
Jonathan E. Adler  and
Lance J. Rips
Russell C. Burnett
Affiliation:
Yale University
Douglas L. Medin
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Jonathan E. Adler
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Lance J. Rips
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Get access

Summary

In 1931, A. R. Luria traveled to rural Uzbekistan with a question: Is thinking influenced by the social and cultural environment? The fieldwork he did there (Luria 1976) was likely the first attempt to answer this question using methods of experimental psychology. Rural folk in Uzbekistan were at that time in the midst of a socioeconomic transition that involved, among other things, the collectivization of agriculture and the growth of schools and literacy. Luria saw in this a natural experiment. He found groups of participants with different levels of involvement in this transition – including different levels of schooling and literacy – and gave them a variety of cognitive tasks. Some of these were designed to elicit deductive inferences from premises like “precious metals don't rust” and “gold is a precious metal.” Luria found that subjects with no formal schooling often balked at such problems, rejecting the premises and saying, for example, that “one can speak only of what one has seen.” In contrast, subjects who had been to school were more likely to use the hypothetical premises to draw conclusions (e.g., “gold doesn't rust”) with no obvious basis in personal experience. Luria also exercised some experimental control, manipulating whether the content of an argument was familiar or unfamiliar to participants. Participants who had not been to school treated the two kinds of content differently, drawing conclusions from premises more often when the content was familiar than when it was unfamiliar.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reasoning
Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations
 , pp. 934 - 955
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anggoro, F., Waxman, S., & Medin, D. (2005). The effect of naming practices on children's understanding of living things. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 547–609.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atran, S., Medin, D., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ek', Ucan E., & Sousa, P. (2001). Folkbiology doesn't come from folk psychology: Evidence from Yukatek Maya in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2005). The cultural mind: Environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations. Psychological Review, 112, 744–776.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atran, S., Medin, D., Ross, N., Lynch, E., Coley, J., Ek', Ucan E., & Vapnarsky, V. (1999). Folk ecology and commons management in the Maya Lowlands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 96, 7598–7603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atran, S., Medin, D., Ross, N., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ek', E. U., Coley, J., Timura, C., & Baran, M. (2002). Folk ecology, cultural epidemiology, and the spirit of the commons: A garden experiment in the Maya lowlands, 1991–2001. Current Anthropology, 43, 421–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailenson, J. N., Shum, M. S., Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Coley, J. D. (2002). A bird's eye view: Biological categorization and reasoning within and across cultures. Cognition, 84, 1–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bang, M., Medin, D., Unsworth, S., & Townsend, J. (2005, April). Cultural models of nature and their relevance to science education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal.Google Scholar
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnett, R. C. (2004). Inference from complex causal models. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Burnett, R. C. (2005). Close does count: Evidence of a proximity effect in inference from causal knowledge. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Burnett, R. C., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2004). Experts don't reason about fish out of water: Fishermen's inductive reasoning is based on causal-ecological relations [Contribution to festschrift for Edward E. Smith]. Available in PsycEXTRA.
Burnett, R. C., Medin, D. L., Ross, N. O., & Blok, S. V. (2005). Ideal is typical. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 5–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 47–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Smith, E. E. (1997). Culture, category salience, and inductive reasoning. Cognition, 65, 15–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, D. (2001). Cultural variation: Considerations and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 451–471.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cole, M., & Scribner, S. (1974). Culture and thought: A psychological introduction. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Coley, J. D., Shafto, P., Stepanova, O., & Baraff, E. (2005). Knowledge and category-based induction. In Ahn, W., Goldstone, R. L., Love, B. C., Markman, A. B., & Wolff, P. (Eds.), Categorization inside and outside the laboratory: Essays in honor of Douglas L. Medin. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dias, M., Roazzi, A., & Harris, P. L. (2005). Reasoning from unfamiliar premises: A study with unschooled adults. Psychological Science, 16, 550–554.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., & Markman, E. M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23, 183–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glymour, C. (2001). The mind's arrows: Bayes nets and graphical causal models in psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T., & Danks, D. (2004). A theory of causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological Review, 111, 3–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenfield, P. M. (1983). Review of the bookThe psychology of literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 53, 216–220.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3. Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hadjichristidis, C., Sloman, S., Stevenson, R., & Over, D. (2004). Feature centrality and property induction. Cognitive Science, 28, 45–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hausman, D. M., & Woodward, J. (1999). Independence, invariance and the Causal Markov Condition. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 50, 521–583.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heckerman, D., Meek, C., & Cooper, G. (1999). A Bayesian approach to causal discovery. In Glymour, C. & Cooper, G. F. (Eds)., Computation, causation, and discovery (pp. 141–165). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.Google Scholar
Heit, E. (1998). A Bayesian analysis of some forms of inductive reasoning. In Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (Eds.), Rational models of cognition (pp. 248–274). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heit, E. (2000). Properties of inductive reasoning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 569–592.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heit, E., & Rubinstein, J. (1994). Similarity and property effects in inductive reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 411–422.Google ScholarPubMed
Higgins, E. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In Higgins, E. & Kruglanski, A. (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Hong, Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Martinez, V. B. (2000). Multicultural minds. American Psychologist, 55, 709–720.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Inagaki, K. (1990). The effects of raising animals on children's biological knowledge. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 119–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ji, L.-J., Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (2000). Culture, control, and perception of relationships in the environment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 943–955.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keil, F. C. (1995). The growth of causal understandings of natural kinds. In Sperber, D., Premack, D., & Premack, A. J. (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 234–262). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (2003a). Categorisation, causation, and the limits of understanding. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 663–692.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keil, F. C. (2003b). Folkscience: Coarse interpretations of a complex reality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 368–373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keil, F. C., Levin, D. T., Richman, B. A., & Gutheil, G. (1999). Mechanism and explanation in the development of biological thought: The case of disease. In Medin, D. L. & Atran, S. (Eds.), Folkbiology (pp. 285–319). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C., Smith, W. C., Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Two dogmas of conceptual empiricism: Implications for hybrid models of the structure of knowledge. Cognition, 65, 103–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kushnir, T., Gopnik, A., Schulz, L., & Danks, D. (2003). Inferring hidden causes. Proceedings of the 25th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Lagnado, D. A., & Sloman, S. (2004). The advantage of timely intervention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 856–876.Google ScholarPubMed
Lee, F., Hallahan, M., & Herzog, T. (1996). Explaining real-life events: How culture and domain shape attributions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 732–741.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
López, A., Atran, S., Coley, J. D., Medin, D. L., & Smith, E. E. (1997). The tree of life: Universal and cultural features of folkbiological taxonomies and inductions. Cognitive Psychology, 32, 251–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luria, A. R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations (Lopez-Morillas, M. & Solotaroff, L., trans.; Cole, M., ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, E. B., Coley, J. D., & Medin, D. L. (2000). Tall is typical: Central tendency, ideal dimensions, and graded category structure among tree experts and novices. Memory & Cognition, 28, 41–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDonald, J., Samuels, M., & Rispoli, J. (1996). A hypothesis-assessment model of categorical argument strength. Cognition, 59, 199–217.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medin, D. L., & Atran, S. (2004). The native mind: Biological categorization and reasoning in development and across cultures. Psychological Review, 111, 960–983.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medin, D. L., Coley, J. D., Storms, G., & Hayes, B. K. (2003). A relevance theory of induction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 517–532.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medin, D. L., Lynch, E. B., Coley, J. D., & Atran, S. (1997). Categorization and reasoning among tree experts: Do all roads lead to Rome?Cognitive Psychology, 32, 49–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medin, D. L., Ross, N. O., Atran, S., Cox, D., Coley, J., Proffitt, J. B., & Blok, S. (2006). Folkbiology of freshwater fish. Cognition, 99, 237–273.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medin, D. L., Ross, N., Atran, S., Burnett, R. C., & Blok, S. V. (2002). Categorization and reasoning in relation to culture and expertise. In Ross, B. (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 41, pp. 1–41). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Medin, D. L., Ross, N. O. & Cox, D. G. (2006). Culture and resource conflict: Why meanings matter. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Medin, D. L., Unsworth, S. J., & Hirschfeld, L. (2007). Culture, categorization and reasoning. In Kitayama, S. & Cohen, D. (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Medin, D. L., & Waxman, S. R. (2007). Interpreting asymmetries of projection in children's inductive reasoning. In Feeney, A. & Heit, E. (Eds.), Inductive reasoning. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 961–978.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949–971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nisbett, R. E. (2003). The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently … and why. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (2002). Culture and cognition. In Medin, D. (Ed.), Stevens' handbook of experimental psychology: Vol. 2. Memory and cognitive processes (3rd ed.; Pashler, H., editor-in-chief) (pp. 561–597). New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norenzayan, A., Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. E. (2002). Cultural similarities and differences in social inference: Evidence from behavioral predictions and lay theories of behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 109–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norenzayan, A., & Heine, S. J. (2005). Psychological universals: What are they and how can we know?Psychological Bulletin, 131, 763–784.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osherson, D. N., Smith, E. E., Wilkie, O., López, A., & Shafir, E. (1990). Category-based induction. Psychological Review, 97, 185–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearl, J. (2000). Causality: Models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peng, K., & Knowles, E. D. (2003). Culture, education, and the attribution of physical causality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 1272–1284.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Proffitt, J. B., Coley, J. D., & Medin, D. L. (2000). Expertise and category-based induction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 811–828.Google ScholarPubMed
Rehder, B., & Burnett, R. C. (2005). Feature inference and the causal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 50, 264–314.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rehder, B., & Hastie, R. (2001). Causal knowledge and categories: The effects of causal beliefs on categorization, induction, and similarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 323–360.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rips, L. J. (1975). Inductive judgments about natural categories. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 665–681.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rips, L. J. (2001). Necessity and natural categories. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 827–852.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, B. H., & Murphy, G. L. (1999). Food for thought. Cognitive Psychology, 38, 495–553.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, N., Medin, D., Coley, J. D., & Atran, S. (2003). Cultural and experiential differences in the development of folkbiological induction. Cognitive Development, 18, 25–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26, 521–562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, W. (1984). Scientific explanation and the causal structure of the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Scribner, S. (1977). Modes of thinking and ways of speaking: Culture and logic reconsidered. Ins Johnson-Laird, P. N. & Wason, P. C. (Eds.), Thinking: Readings in cognitive science (pp. 483–500). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shafto, P., & Coley, J. D. (2003). Development of categorization and reasoning in the natural world: Novices to experts, naive similarity to ecological knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 641–649.Google ScholarPubMed
Shafto, P., Coley, J. D., & Baldwin, D. (2005). Knowledge-based induction: A matter of availability. Manuscript submitted for publication.Google Scholar
Sloman, S. A. (1993). Feature-based induction. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 231–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloman, S. A., & Lagnado, D. A. (2005). Do we “do”?Cognitive Science, 29, 5–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sober, E. (1988). The principle of the common cause. In Fetzer, J. H. (Ed.), Probability and causality: Essays in honor of Wesley C. Salmon (pp. 211–228). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., & Scheines, R. (2000). Causation, prediction, and search (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Steyvers, M., Tenenbaum, J. B., Wagenmakers, E.-J., & Blum, B. (2003). Inferring causal networks from observations and interventions. Cognitive Science, 27, 453–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarlowski, A. (2006). If it's an animal it has axons: Experience and culture in preschool children's reasoning about animates. Cognitive Development, 21, 249–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tenenbaum, J. B., & Griffiths, T. L. (2003). Theory-based causal inference. In Becker, S., Thrun, S., & Obermayer, K. (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tenenbaum, J. B., Griffiths, T. L., & Niyogi, S. (2007). Intuitive theories as grammars for causal inference. In Gopnik, A. & Schulz, L. (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henst, J.-B., Sperber, D., & Politzer, G. (2002). When is a conclusion worth deriving? A relevance-based analysis of indeterminate relational problems. Thinking & Reasoning, 8, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waldmann, M. R., & Hagmayer, Y. (2005). Seeing versus doing: Two modes of accessing causal knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 216–227.Google ScholarPubMed
Waldmann, M. R., & Martignon, L. (1998). A Bayesian network model of causal learning. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×