Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 113

“One of These Things” is a song used on Sesame Street when children are shown a group of four items, one of which is different from the other three. Children are asked to identify the item that does not belong with the others. Look at the three objects in Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3Stimulus for Culture’s Effect on Organization

Source: Adapted from Nisbett (2003, p. 141).

In this case, which two objects would you place together? The chicken and the grass? The chicken and the cow? Or the grass and the cow? Chiu (1972) showed such figures to children from China and the United States. Children from the United States grouped objects because they belonged to the same taxonomic category; that is, the same categorization term could be applied to both. The children from the United States would more likely group the chicken and cow together as “animals.” The Chinese children preferred to group objects on the basis of relationships. The Chinese children would more likely group the cow and grass together because “cows eat grass” (Chiu, 1972).

In a similar study, Mutsumi Imai and Dedre Gentner (1994) showed objects to people of various ages from Japan and the United States and asked them to group them together. For example, one object was a pyramid made of cork, which they called a dax, a word that had no meaning to the participants. Then they showed the participants a pyramid made of white plastic and a different object made of cork. They then asked the participants to point to a dax. To which of these two later objects would you point?

People from the United States in the study chose the same shape, indicating that they were coding what they saw as an object. The Japanese were more likely to choose the same material, indicating that they were coding what they saw as a substance.