Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, but is it universal? Do people from different cultures reason analogically in the same way? Despite the prevalence of analogical research, to date, there is almost no cross-cultural work investigating analogical reasoning in adults from non-WEIRD cultures. Here we fill this important gap by revisiting a long-standing cross-cultural difference—the holistic-analytic difference among Easterners and Westerners (Nisbett, 2001)—to ask whether this difference is also evident in analogical reasoning. Decades of cross-cultural research showed that Easterners are more attentive to contextual relations than Westerners, giving way to an untested presumption that Easterners are more relational, more analogical than Westerners. We tested this assumption using the classic holistic-analytic task and scene analogy mapping task with US and Chinese participants. While we replicated the holistic-analytic (East-West) difference, US and Chinese participants did not differ in the analogy task.