Judging the World Dialectically versus Non-Dialectically

Abstract

For over three decades, cultural psychologists have advocated the importance of cultural meaning systems and their effects on basic modes of perception and cognition. This chapter reviews findings which have demonstrated that culturally dominant ways of thinking influence people’s basic perceptual and cognitive processes: East Asians are more likely to endorse holistic thinking and dialectical thinking style when they process information, such that they incorporate more contextual information into their judgments of focal objects, and North Americans are more likely to endorse non-dialectical thinking and analytical thinking styles, by focusing on foreground information. The chapter also reviews recent findings related to higher cognitive processes in judgments and decision making processes. It emphasizes two lines of research showing how cultural differences in perception and cognition affect the online decision making process, one involving various online processes in decision making and the other involving how cultures experience indecisiveness in their decisions. Finally, this chapter introduces recent findings highlighting how cultural differences in perception and cognition affect how people make judgments involved in resource allocation, how cultural consistency values affect personality judgments, and how memory judgments are affected by neural cues. To close, it discusses the importance of this line of research and its future directions.