Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition.

By Richard E. Nisbett, Kaiping Peng, Incheol Choi, Ara Norenzayan. Psychology Review, 2001

3,957 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37e4180aaf2e4762cbdc9dd04e714643d86c219f

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Citations in the corpus

When does negative brand publicity hurt? The moderating influence of analytic versus holistic thinking (2008, background): “Holistic thinking is defined as “involving an orientation to the context or field as a whole, including attention to relationships between a focal object and the field, and a preference for explaining and predicting events on the basis of such relationships” (Nisbett et al., 2001, p. 293).”
Culture, Power, and Experience: Toward a Person-Centered Cultural Psychology (2004, background): “When Nisbett and his colleagues [Nisbett et al., 2001] discussed the Chinese, they did not only mistake passports for cultural categories, but they also ignored centuries of discourse on racial and ethnic differences.”
Exemplars or beliefs? The impact of self-view on the nature and relative influence of brand associations (2006, background): “Greater attention is paid to the interrelatedness of events and the contextual information that may have led to the behavior (Cousins 1989; Nisbett et al. 2001).”
A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion (2020, background): “Culture can shape thinking styles, wherein Western cultures tend to emphasize thinking analytically and Eastern cultures tend to emphasize thinking holistically (Nisbett et al., 2001).”
Striving for balance in economics : towards a theory of the social determination of behavior (2016, positive): “52 way individuals decode their visual environment, guiding attention, perception, and memory (Nisbett et al. 2001).”
Word and voice: Spontaneous attention to emotional utterances in two languages (2002, positive): “…Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997), social cognition (Morris & Peng, 1994), reasoning (Nisbett et al., 2001), emotion (Kitayama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), motivation (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999), and mental health…”
The Social Dimensions of Entrepreneurship (2005, positive): “(personal) cognitive styles, leading scholars to consider cultures as ‘systems of thought’ (Nisbett et al. 2001; Peng, Ames and Knowles 2001).”