Dr Stella Christie
Tsinghua University

Presentenced at the symposium for cross-cultural research in analogical reasoning. The full symposium is available to view here:    • Symposium on cross-cultural research ...  

Abstract: One prevalent cross-cultural phenomenon is the holistic vs. analytic difference among Easterners and Westerners (e.g., Nisbett, 2001). Decades of cross-cultural research have shown that Easterners are more attentive to contextual relations compared to Westerners—a holistic thinking style that is also often called relational thinking style. But is the relational-holistic cognitive style the same as relational thinking in the sense of analogical reasoning? If so, then we should predict that people with the more holistic thinking style should also be more analogical-relational. Surprisingly, despite the prevalence of both lines of works (relational-holistic and relational-analogical), no studies have directly compared the two. In this talk I will discuss a series of studies that we have done using classic holistic-analytic tasks and a scene analogy mapping task with US and Chinese participants. While we replicated the holistic-analytic (East-West) difference, US and Chinese participants did not differ in the analogy task. I discuss how these results contribute to our understanding of relational thinking across cultures.

Speaker bio: Stella Christie is an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, Research Chair at the Tsinghua Brain and Intelligence Laboratory, and Director of the Child Cognition Centre. Her research focuses on understanding relational cognition in humans and other animals, investigating questions such as what are the basic relations that humans and/or other animals possess, how we learn to become relational thinkers, and what is the role of relational cognition in the social mind? Having lived in six countries on all hemispheres, Dr Christie has a particular interest in how relational reasoning is influenced by, and influences, language, culture, and social interactions.