Ecocultural basis of cognition: farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders

Abstract

It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by demonstrations showing that East Asians, who are relatively interdependent, reason and perceive in a more holistic fashion than do Westerners. We examined holistic cognitive tendencies in attention, categorization, and reasoning in three types of communities that belong to the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic regions and yet vary in their degree of social interdependence: farming, fishing, and herding communities in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region. As predicted, members of farming and fishing communities, which emphasize harmonious social interdependence, exhibited greater holistic tendencies than members of herding communities, which emphasize individual decision making and foster social independence. Our findings have implications for how ecocultural factors may have lasting consequences on important aspects of cognition.

Fig. 1.

Ecoculture and attention. (a) An illustration of the Framed Line Test from ref. . (b) The mean error size in millimeters show that herders were less accurate in the relative task than were farmers and fishermen, whereas farmers and fishermen were less accurate in the absolute task than were herders.

Fig. 2.

Ecoculture and categorization. (a) An example of grouping tasks from ref. . (b) Farmers and fishermen much more often grouped objects on the basis of similarities and relationships among the objects than did herders.

Fig. 3.

Ecoculture and reasoning. (a) An example of categorization tasks from ref. . (b) Farmers and fishermen more often perceived similarities based on holistic judgments of family resemblance, but herders more frequently perceived similarities based on the unidimensional rule.