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Culture, Cognition, and Intercultural Relations

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Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts

Part of the book series: International and Cultural Psychology ((ICUP))

Abstract

Na and Chan examine the cultural variations in reasoning style. They highlight the well-documented differences in cognition that paints Easterners as being holistic processors and Westerners being analytic processors. Na and Chan assess this overarching construct by reviewing the cultural differences of attention, attribution, and motivation.

Attention has shown cultural differences where Easterners are more relational and Westerners are more focused. Across various attention tasks, Easterners attend widely to a scene including contextual cues while Westerners are more concerned with focal elements. The neuroimaging evidence for these differences indicates cultural differences in frontoparietal activation for attention tasks.

Cultural differences in attribution show that Easterners use relational reasoning with making attributes about behavior while Westerners focus more on the central figures. Na and Chan detail a study using event-related potential on a lexical decision task that suggests differences in attribution-based neural activity between cultures. Additional neuroimaging studies of phenomena similar to attribution are also discussed.

Easterners have been shown to believe that broad social contexts operate to make choices while Westerners believe a choice is an act of self-expression. Na and Chan detail neuroimaging studies that investigate cognitive dissonance and choice justification to examine the cultural differences. These studies show a wide variety of neural responses that underlie cultural differences in cognitive dissonance.

Na and Chan conclude by discussing how the understanding of cultural differences in reasoning style could be used in our multicultural world.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W Campbell Rd, Richardson, TX, 75080-3021, USA

    Jinkyung Na & Micaela Y. Chan

  2. Center for Vital Longevity, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1600 Viceroy Dr. Suite 800, Dallas, TX, 75235, USA

    Micaela Y. Chan

Authors
  1. Jinkyung Na
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  2. Micaela Y. Chan
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Correspondence to Jinkyung Na .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioral Sciences, Arkansas Tech University, Russellville, Arkansas, USA

    Jason E. Warnick

  2. University of Hawaii, Hilo, Hawaii, USA

    Dan Landis

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Na, J., Chan, M.Y. (2015). Culture, Cognition, and Intercultural Relations. In: Warnick, J., Landis, D. (eds) Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2260-4_3

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