Culture, Class and Cognition: Evidence from Italy

Abstract

East Asians have been found to reason in relatively holistic fashion and Americans in relatively analytic fashion. It has been proposed that these cognitive diff erences are the result of social practices that encourage interdependence for Asians and independence for Americans. If so, cognitive diff erences might be found even across regions that are geographically close. We compared performance on a categorization task of relatively interdependent southern Italians and relatively independent northern Italians and found the former to reason in a more holistic fashion than the latter. Furthermore, as it has been argued that working class social practices encourage interdependence and middle class practices encourage independence, we anticipated that working class participants might reason in a more holistic fashion than middle class participants. Th is is what we found -at least for southern Italy.

Cognitive deficits and ethnicity: a cohort study of early psychosis patients in The Netherlands

“…Cultural background A body of literature has shown that cognitive styles differ substantially across cultures [43][44][45][46][47]. A well-known example of such a difference is analytic versus holistic.…”

Diferencias individuales en razonamiento deductivo: una revisión narrativa

“…En términos generales, estos refieren a característi-cas más bien vagas que a resultados determinantes. Knight y Nisbett (2007), por ejemplo, han encontrado que los asiáticos estarían inclinados a razonar y percibir de una manera más holística, a hacer hincapié en relaciones y similitudes entre objetos y eventos, y a deslizarse en un amplio campo perceptual. Los occidentales, en cambio, tenderían a razonar de forma más analítica, a focalizar en un objeto central y a razonar utilizando reglas y categorías.…”

“…En este sentido, se sabe que los asiáticos del este son más dependientes entre sí, y tienden a centrar su atención en el mundo social y el campo como un todo. Por su parte, los occidentales suelen ser menos dependientes, y tendientes a focalizar su atención en un objeto único (Knight y Nisbett, 2007).…”

Cultural Congruence and Rating Scale Biases in Homepages

“…12], and in cultural studies since the 1960s [13]. Biases have even been found in populations assumed to be relatively homogeneous, such as comparisons of Northern and Southern Italians [14] or Eastern and Western Europeans [15]. Adding studies involving cultures known to differ considerably exacerbates the difficulty of solving the response bias problem.…”