1. What is the difference between culture-free and culture-fair IQ tests?
2. At school you have learned that the Battle of Hastings took place in the year 1066 and that Italy won the football World Cup in 2006. Which of these three varieties of intelligence best describes what you have learned?
a. Fluid intelligence b. Crystallised intelligence c. Indigenous intelligence
Differentiation (favoured, they argue, by North Americans) involves comparing two statements and ultimately selecting one of them as true, thus removing any contradiction. For example, either ‘hawks’ (warriors) or ‘doves’ (peacemakers) are seen as being right in a debate about world peace – but not both. Meanwhile dialectical thinking involves looking for a compromise position that tolerates inconsistencies and incompatibilities.
Peng and Nisbett (1999) compared North American and Chinese participants’ preferences for dialectical solutions to various problems and contradictions. Their results support the view that there are cul- turally distinct strategies to addressing contradictions. American and Chinese participants seemingly apply differing heuristics (rules of thumb) when presented with contradictory statements, ambiguous proverbs, everyday quarrels and philosophical debates. The American way emphasises selecting a single true statement from a choice of two alternatives. The Chinese way seeks defensible positions in apparently (to some) incompatible statements. Links between culture and argu- mentative style have been made by a number of researchers. Leung (1987) found Chinese participants to prefer harmonious resolutions to conflict situations, with North Americans opting for a more adversarial approach. Nakamura (1985) noted that compared with Western Europeans and North Americans, Asians and Chinese are less likely to approach contradictions by engaging in formal debates that produce only one winner.
However, critics suggest that the art of compromise is something that develops with age, notwithstanding cultural background. Older
TABLE 6.1
Cross-cultural variations in cognitive style
Principles of Chinese dialectical thought Principles of western logical thought
Change/Bian Yi Lu Identity
Reality is seen as constantly in flux and open to subjective interpretation. Nothing stays the same for very long.
Anything that is true is irrefutably true and cannot be false. Any thing is irrefutably equal to itself and nothing else.
Contradiction/Mao Dun Lu Non-contradiction Contrariness is a natural state. Good/bad,
hot/cold, old/new happily coexist in all things.
A statement cannot be both true and false, but must be one or the other.
Holism/Zheng He Lu The ‘excluded middle’ law
Nothing and no one exists independently of others. All events and beings are connec- ted. Phenomena cannot be studied out of context.
Only one of any two contradictory statements can be accepted. ‘Middle way’ compromise positions are unacceptable.
people have been shown to be more likely to take dialectical stances in conflict situations (Kramer & Woodruff, 1986). Ho (2000, cited in Berry et al., 2002, p. 142) suggests that some North American participants do prefer dialectical responses, and vice versa. Clearly, factors other than culture do influence cognitive style.
But how does culture manifest itself in diverse patterns of thinking?
There is a suggested link between socialisation practices and cognitive style, especially in relation to visual perception tasks. In other words, the experience of living in different societies has been shown to encourage differential responses to certain perceptual tasks, such as the rod and frame test (see Figure 6.10). Cultures where conformity and subservience to authority are highly valued have been linked with a perceptual tendency towards rod and frame field-dependence.
The socialisation of assertiveness to authority correlated with field-independence on the same test (Witkin & Berry, 1975). Field- dependence has also been observed to correlate with overall struc- tural differences between social groups. In rural India, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities have tended to score closer to the field-independence end of the continuum on perceptual tests.
Agriculturalists tended towards field-dependency (Mishra et al., 1996).
Further evidence suggests that in non-industrial societies, increased contact with western cultural norms (associated with an introduction to formal schooling) tends to correlate with increased levels of field- independence (Berry et al., 2002). These data, which suggest a link between ecological–cultural factors and cognitive style, have been rep- licated in other cross-cultural studies (Sinha, 1979). In terms of problem-solving strategies, field-independent individuals have also been found to be more likely to make decisions without engagement
In the rod and frame test (RFT) (Witkin, 1959) you are asked to take Figure 1 and rotate the rod until it appears to you to be vertical. The RFT is designed to reveal your level of ‘field dependence’. How influenced is your perception of the upright by the potentially misleading frame around the rod? Figure 2 shows the response of someone who would be described as
‘field-independent’. Figure 3 reveals a field-dependent respondent.
Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3
Figure 6.10 The rod and frame test
of or consultation with others, as compared with those who are more field-dependent. The former appear to function more autonomously (Witkin et al., 1979). Interestingly, field-dependency is a construct that pervades both social and cognitive domains, echoing indigenous conceptions of intelligence (see key concept above) and those of Sternberg (2002).
So does culture change the way we think?
Having begun this chapter by posing this question, we might end by summarising some of the influences that cultural background can exert on our intellectual habits. There is, for example, a strong argument that the character of our environment or ecology has some bearing on our perception of certain visual stimuli, such as visual illusions and art. It is also likely that where we grow up – incorporating how affluent we are or how familiar we are with formal schooling and with aspects of cultural knowledge inherent in intelligence tests (including our definitions of intelligence) – is likely to influence how well we score in the formal testing scenario. Away from formal IQ, cognitive strategies for solving problems and disputes also vary from culture to culture. Intelligent behaviour is manifest in effective expertise, which expresses itself in various local, everyday and often quite specialised settings – where success is not necessarily predictive of educational achievement.
Wherever we look, then, we can see that whatever cognitive character- istics we all share, our ecology, experience and environment have been shown to have some bearing on how we solve problems and make sense of the world.