Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. "Why do you like him?" "How did you solve this problem?" "Why did you take that job?" In our daily lives we answer many such questions about the cognitive processes underlying our choices, evaluations, judgments, and behavior. Sometimes such questions are asked by social scientists. For example, investigators have asked people why they like particular po-The writing of this paper, and some of the research described, was supported by grants GS-40085 and BNS75-23191 from the National Science Foundation. The authors are greatly indebted to Eugene Borgida, Michael Kruger, Lee Ross, Lydia Temoshok) and Amos Tversky for innumerable ideas and generous and constructive criticism.

Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. "Why do you like him?" "How did you solve this problem?" "Why did you take that job?" In our daily lives we answer many such questions about the cognitive processes underlying our choices, evaluations, judgments, and behavior. Sometimes such questions are asked by social scientists. For example, investigators have asked people why they like particular po-The writing of this paper, and some of the research described, was supported by grants GS-40085 and BNS75-23191 from the National Science Foundation. The authors are greatly indebted to Eugene Borgida, Michael Kruger, Lee Ross, Lydia Temoshok) and Amos Tversky for innumerable ideas and generous and constructive criticism.

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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 epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach-retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a "middle way." European-American ways, on the other hand, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarizes contradictory perspectives in an effort to determine which fact or position is correct. Empirical studies showed that dialectical thinking is a form of folk wisdom in Chinese culture: Chinese preferred dialectical proverbs containing seeming contradictions more than did Americans. Chinese were also found to prefer dialectical resolutions to social conflicts, and to prefer dialectical arguments over classical Western logical arguments. Furthermore, when two apparently contradictory propositions were presented, Americans polarized their views and Chinese were moderately accepting of both propositions. Origins of these cultural differences and their implications for human reasoning in general are discussed.