Ecoculture, social interdependence, and holistic cognition

Abstract

Finally in the task measuring attention 23 participants were presented with a series of squares with vertical lines drawn starting from the midpoint of the upper horizontal line of the square. They then received an empty square of a different or same size and asked to draw a line identical to the original line in either absolute length (absolute task) or in proportion to the height of the surrounding square frame (relative task). Performance in the absolute task would benefit from the ability to detach the object from the context in which it is embedded and would thus be decreased by holistic atten-tion. The performance in the relative task would benefit from the ability to process objects within the context in which they appear and would thus be decreased by analytic attention. The analysis of the performance error measured in millimeters showed that, as predicted, farmers and fishermen were more capable of taking contextual information into account and thus performed better than herders in the relative task, whereas herders were more capable of ignoring the context and thus performed better than fishermen and farmers in the absolute task. In sum, results of all three cognitive tasks revealed convergent evidence that farmers and fishermen who live in more socially interdependent ecocultural settings have a more holistic mode of processing of their world than do herders. Importantly, these differences held for each task after levels of schooling is controlled. One strength of this work is that it examines communities with similar ethnic, national and linguistic characteristics and yet vary in the crucial theoretical variable of social interdependence. The findings therefore get us one step closer to the inference that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition than many other possible differences observed between cultures around the world. Ideas worth exploring in future studies that emerged out of this study are as follows. First, our samples consist of individuals who had lived most of their lives in the recruitment site. Although this feature of the sample allowed us to minimize any potential effects of self-selection to live in a chosen ecoculture and acculturation to a different culture, it does not eliminate the possibility that those who might fit better to the social demands of the ecoculture are the ones who chose to live in that ecoculture. Comparing those who left the communities studied here and those who stayed should help tackle the question of self-selection. Second, it is anticipated that some communities in the region will undergo change in the economic activities on which the communities rely on for their income. For example tea plants which have been cultivated for over half a century will eventually need to be replaced with new ones to improve the quality of the tea leaves (personal communication with a lab researcher at Caykur, May 7, 2008). Some communities may decide not to adopt such demanding changes and switch to other means of income. These potential natu-ralistic transitions would provide the means to study the change in cognitive make-up of individuals residing in these communities (see 24 for a similar design). References 1. Fiske AP, Kitayama S, Markus HR, Nisbett RE. The cultural matrix of social psychology. In: Gilbert DT, Fiske ST, Lindzey G, eds. Handbook of Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill 1998; 915-81. 2. Kitayama S, Duffy S. Cultural competence—Tacit, yet fundamental: Self, social relations and cognition in the US and Japan. In: Sternberg RJ, Grigorenko EL, eds. Culture and Competence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association 2004; 55-87. 3. Markus HR, Kitayama S. Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion and motivation. Psychol Rev 1991; 98:224-53. 4. Oyserman D, Uskul AK. Individualism and collectivism: Societal-level processes with impli-cations for individual-level and society-level outcomes. In: van de Vijver F, van Hemert D, Poortinga Y, eds. Multilevel Analysis of Individuals and Cultures. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum 2006; 145-73. 5. Markus HR, Kitayama S. Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion and motivation. Psych Rev 1991; 98:224-53. 6. Triandis H. The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psych Rev 1989; 96:506-20. 7. Nisbett RE. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently …And Why. New York: The Free Press 2003. 8. Nisbett RE, Peng K, Choi I, Norenzayan A. Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychol Rev 2001; 108:291-310. 9. Nisbett RE, Masuda T. Culture and point of view.