Are There Cross-Cultural Differences in Reasoning?

Psychologists have suggested that people from different cultures use different cognitive processes when they reason. Nisbett (2003), for example, proposes that East Asians tend to think holistically, dialectically, and on the basis of their experience, whereas Westerners tend to think analytically, logically, and abstractly. It follows that East Asians should tolerate contradictions to a greater degree than Westerners. We report an experiment in which East Asians were no more likely than Westerners to succumb to illusions of logical consistency, and an experiment in which they were no more likely than Westerners to reason solely from their experience.