Culture and Classification: Investigating Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking Styles
Abstract
This paper sought to explore cultural preferences for analytic and holistic thinking in classification. Experiment 1 paired the Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (SHJ) tasks with the Analysis-Holism scale (AHS) and a demographics questionnaire. Effects of culture on learning rates, alongside the feasibility of online data collection, were assessed. Learning difficulty differences among the six SHJ category sets were observed. Further, as predicted, higher holistic thinking correlated positively with the family resemblance task. Experiment 2 replicated the Norenzayan et al. (2002) task. Unlike in the original study, the effect of instructional condition was not significant across our full sample. Nevertheless, the non-Western sample showed higher holistic thinking in the similarity instruction condition. Moreover, our sample did not show any overwhelming preference for either analytic or holistic thinking strategies. Overall, our results are inconclusive, yet promising, and hint at some effect of culture on classification. This warrants further research in this domain.