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Cognitive contours: recent work on cross-cultural psychology and its relevance for education

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Abstract

This paper outlines new work in cross-cultural psychology largely drawn from Nisbett, Choi, and Smith (Cognition, 65, 15–32, 1997); Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310, 2001; Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. New York: Free Press 2003), Ji, Zhang and Nisbett (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1), 57–65, 2004), Norenzayan (2000) and Peng (Naive Dialecticism and its Effects on Reasoning and Judgement about Contradiction. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1997) Peng and Nisbett (Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Understanding of Physical Causality. Paper presented at the Science and Culture: Proceedings of the Seventh Interdisciplinary Conference on Science and Culture, Frankfort, K. Y. 1996), and Peng, Ames, & Knowles (Culture and Human Inference: Perspectives from three traditions. In: D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 1–2). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000). The paper argues that the findings on cultural influences on inference-making have implications for teaching and education generally, and specifically for the debate on conceptions and misconceptions of Asian students studying in western tertiary institutions around the world. The position defended is that, while there seems to be compelling empirical evidence for intercultural differences in thought patterns, these patterns are, for the most part, insignificant in everyday exchanges, though language and culture might subtlety modulate our inference-making at the margins. Linguistic determinism however is not defended. Nonetheless, the evidence provides food for thought, and it needs to inform the recent debates about international students studying overseas.

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Notes

  1. Conducted at Swinburne and Edith Cowan universities respectively (Davis, n.d., “Drag queens learn tips of the trade" 2003, “Nelson aims the axe at ‘cappuccino’ uni courses", 2003, “Surfing Goes Up a Degree")

  2. Elsewhere, in a lead article in Business Review Weekly, Way writes: ‘Manipulating a vital flow of cash from fee paying students means universities are under pressure to ensure these students pass—a process academics concede privately, is “dumbing down” the system’ (Way, 2000).

  3. This claim overlooks a complex and much-debated issue. The issue is whether critical thinking is best understood as a general or a specific skill (i.e., largely independent of the language of the disciplines or embedded within them). This debate has important implications for the teaching of critical thinking. The “generalists” are described as those for whom critical thinking is a universal, general skill, and best taught accordingly in dedicated logic classes. The “specifists” are those for whom critical thinking “is best conceived of as only a loose category taking in diverse modes of thought” (Moore, 2004, p. 4), and best taught only within the language of the disciplines. Moore cites Robert Ennis (Ennis, 1985, 1987, 1992) as a defender of the former position and John McPeck as a defender of the latter position (McPeck, 1981, 1990, 1992). Others have argued that the debate between the generalists and the specifists amount to a fallacy of the false alternative (Davies, 2006a; Quinn, 1994).

  4. Samuelowicz (1987) put the negative case clearest: ‘In many Asian countries ... the intellectual skills of comparing, evaluating different points of view, arguing and presenting one’s point of view are not developed’ (cited in Chalmers and Volet, 1997, p. 93). The point has been made less charitably by Way: ‘In my opinion, many overseas students ... simply aren’t up to it. They’re not capable of writing a thesis, or structuring arguments, of writing in an academically acceptable way. In many cases, supervisors end up acting as an interpreter’ (Way, 2000).

  5. To take one interesting example, Kirkpatrick (1994) has found that the use of “advanced organizers” (words like “because”) is used differently in English and Chinese, with the words either pointing “forwards” or “backwards” in the sentence, depending on the language. This can lead to a quite different sense of information priority (Davies, 2002).

  6. Compound bilinguals learn native and second languages simultaneously and, owing to earlier learning, have one representational token for a verbal label and its translational equivalent. Coordinate bilinguals learn native and second languages consecutively and, owing to later learning, have two distinct representations, and ‘relatively independent associational networks for translational equivalents’ (Ji et al., 2004). Neurological evidence exists supporting these differences in terms of the spatial location of language activity areas (Kim, Relkin, Lee, & Hirsch, 1997).

  7. As noted earlier, empirical studies have looked at different national groups and the results are largely the same.

  8. The “prior theory” expresses how a speaker is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of a speaker; the “passing theory” expresses how a speaker does, in fact, interpret the message of a speaker. In the above discussion, I am imagining what this might look like considering inference-making instead of utterances.

  9. In the case of Australian higher educator providers, this is an a explicit requirement as mentioned in the Australian Vice Chancellor’s Committee (AVCC) Code of Conduct (AVCC, 2005)

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented as a non-refereed paper for the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) conference in Miri, Malaysia in 2004 under the title: “Ways of Reasoning, Ways of Inferencing”. I benefited from the discussion that followed the presentation. This revised version has been improved following comments from A-W. Harzing, S. Gowan, and two anonymous readers from the journal.

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  1. Economics and Commerce, The University of Melbourne, Royal Parade, Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia

    W. Martin Davies

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Martin Davies, W. Cognitive contours: recent work on cross-cultural psychology and its relevance for education. Stud Philos Educ 26, 13–42 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-006-9012-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-006-9012-4

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