Culture, control, and perception of relationships in the environment.

Abstract

East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively "holistic", that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole.Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object-focused and control-oriented.We compared East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans on detection of covariation and field dependence.The results showed that (1) Chinese participants reported stronger association between events, were more responsive to differences in covariation, and were more confident about their covariation judgments;(2) These cultural differences disappeared when participants believed they had some control over the covariation judgment task; (3) American participants made fewer mistakes on the Rod-and-Frame test, indicating that they were less field dependent; (4) American performance and confidence, but not that of Asians, increased when participants were given manual control of the test.Possible origins of the perceptual differences are discussed. Characters (with spaces): 958Culture, Control and Perception 3 Scholars in many disciplines have maintained that people in Asian cultures, especially the East Asian cultures of China, Korea and Japan, have a relatively holistic cognitive orientation, emphasizing relationships and connectedness.The traditional Chinese view, from ancient times forward, is that "the world is a collection of overlapping and interpenetrating stuffs or substances…" (Hansen, 1983, p. 30).Since the Chinese saw the world as interpenetrating and continuous, their attempts to understand it caused them to be oriented toward the complexities of the perceptual or conceptual field taken as a whole (Moore, 1968, p. 3).For the Chinese, the individual object was "not a primary conceptual starting point" (Moser, 1996, p. 169) "[T]he background scheme [of Chinese thought was] that of mass substances rather than that of objects and properties" (Hansen, 1983, p. 31).