Westerners classify things according to the how much individual members of a class resemble each other, and East Asians according to the relationships between the classes:
For the Greeks, things belonged in the same category if they were describable by the same attributes. But the philosopher Donald Munro points out that, for the Chinese, shared attributes did not establish shared class membership. Instead, things were classed together because they were thought to influence one another through resonance. For example, in the Chinese system of the Five Processes, the categories spring, east, wood, wind, and green all influenced one another. Change in wind would affect all the others—in “a process like a multiple echo, without physical contact coming between any of them.” Philosopher David Moser also notes that it was similarity between classes, not similarity among individual members of the same class, that was of interest to the ancient Chinese. They were simply not concerned about the relationship between a member of a class (“a horse”) and the class as a whole (“horses”). [...]
Take a look at the three objects pictured in the illustration on page 141. If you were to place two objects together, which would they be? Why do those seem to be the ones that belong together?
If you’re a Westerner, odds are you think the chicken and the cow belong together. Developmental psychologist Liang-hwang Chiu showed triplets like that in the illustration to American and Chinese children. Chiu found that the American children preferred to group objects because they belonged to the “taxonomic” category, that is, the same classification term could be applied to both (“adults,” “tools”). Chinese children preferred to group objects on the basis of relationships. They would be more likely to say the cow and the grass in the illustration go together because “the cow eats the grass.”
Li-jun Ji, Zhiyong Zhang, and I obtained similar results comparing college students from the U.S with students from mainland China and Taiwan, using words instead of pictures. We presented participants with sets of three words (e.g., panda, monkey, banana) and asked them to indicate which two of the three were most closely related. The American participants showed a marked preference for grouping on the basis of common category membership: Panda and monkey fit into the animal category. The Chinese participants showed a preference for grouping on the basis of thematic relationships (e.g., monkey and banana) and justified their answers in terms of relationships: Monkeys eat bananas.
My girlfriend, who’s into homesteading, thought the cow goes with the grass without knowing the context of the question.
China is 45% rural, while the US is 14% rural. Maybe the fact that the US appears to be much more urbanized leads more of its people to lean on abstract groupings? What would the results be if restricted to rural vs. rural or urban vs. urban samples of the population of each country? Even then, I would have to assume the average Chinese college student tends to have more connections with rural lifestyles than the average American college student.
This study reminds me of a similar association-based intelligence test given to rural inhabitants of Soviet Siberia before the Industrial Revolution hit them. They, like the rural Chinese, classified objects together by use instead of taxonomy. The Soviet study is supplemental evidence that the difference comes from urban vs rural distinction rather than one based on philosophical lineage.
Another reason the average Chinese person has more connections with rural lifestyles is how hometown villages work. An enduring theme in Chinese culture is that the city is a place you work but your ancestral village is “home”.
I’m Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret ‘goes with’ as ‘is more like’? I’d have thought it means ‘belongs together’. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but ‘one eats the other’ seems like a more direct relationship.)
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
Westerners classify things according to the how much individual members of a class resemble each other, and East Asians according to the relationships between the classes:
My girlfriend, who’s into homesteading, thought the cow goes with the grass without knowing the context of the question.
China is 45% rural, while the US is 14% rural. Maybe the fact that the US appears to be much more urbanized leads more of its people to lean on abstract groupings? What would the results be if restricted to rural vs. rural or urban vs. urban samples of the population of each country? Even then, I would have to assume the average Chinese college student tends to have more connections with rural lifestyles than the average American college student.
This study reminds me of a similar association-based intelligence test given to rural inhabitants of Soviet Siberia before the Industrial Revolution hit them. They, like the rural Chinese, classified objects together by use instead of taxonomy. The Soviet study is supplemental evidence that the difference comes from urban vs rural distinction rather than one based on philosophical lineage.
Another reason the average Chinese person has more connections with rural lifestyles is how hometown villages work. An enduring theme in Chinese culture is that the city is a place you work but your ancestral village is “home”.
I’m Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret ‘goes with’ as ‘is more like’? I’d have thought it means ‘belongs together’. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but ‘one eats the other’ seems like a more direct relationship.)
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
Right, I think it’s just hard to interpret the results of this test.
When you put it like that I feel like the homesteading answer is more correct and results from increased knowledge absent from the urban population.