Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do some cultures think more abstractly than others? According to tests of formal logic and rule-based reasoning, Western-ers tend to think more abstractly than East Asians. Yet, rule-based reasoning is only one type of abstract thinking. Moregenerally, thinking abstractly involves discerning relationships and seeing the big picture. Here we argue that previous testsof attention, perception, and memory can be interpreted as showing that East Asians tend to think more abstractly thanWesterners. To test this hypothesis directly we gave a validated measure of abstract thinking (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989)to Chinese and US individuals. Participants chose either abstract or concrete definitions of events. Across six indepen-dent national samples (total N=1,798), Chinese participants tended to construe events more abstractly, and US participantsmore concretely. Within China, more independent (Western-like) groups chose more concrete definitions. Together, theseresults challenge the generalization that Westerners have a greater propensity for abstract thought.