A series of simple logic tests helped Stanford psychologists to prove that American and Chinese children learn to think abstractly and think in this way in very different ways. Their findings were presented in the journal PNAS.
Scientists and ordinary people have long been interested in what exactly distinguishes eastern and western peoples and what are the reasons for these differences. Researchers first tried to uncover them in a famous experiment that Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, two now famous social psychologists, conducted in 1991.
They showed that the differences in the mentality of Eastern and Western peoples are due to the fact that the former consider themselves to be “collectivists”, and the latter as individualists. For this reason, as scientists then suggested, complete mutual understanding between East and West is unlikely to ever be possible.
Subsequently, these results were disputed by other scientists, who were able to show that these differences are less pronounced when comparing not the Chinese and Americans, but other Eastern peoples and Europeans. On the other hand, some other researchers suggest that these differences may be even deeper. In their opinion, they may be associated with fundamental differences in how people of the West and East think.
Walker and her colleagues made the first comparison of this kind, observing the intellectual development of four hundred young kindergarten children living in several major cities in China and the United States.
Scientists were interested in how quickly these preschoolers mastered the basics of logical and abstract thinking. To do this, the experimenters assembled a toy into which they could insert two sets of several "Lego cubes" on which circles, squares and other geometric shapes were drawn.
It was designed in such a way that when different or identical abstract figures were inserted, the toy started to play music. Observing her work, the child had to reveal the principle of its action and learn to turn it on on his own.
Experiments like this, which psychologists and evolutionists have been doing for many years on children in developed Western countries, point to a curious phenomenon. In the first two years of life, according to Walker, children do a good job at this task, holding their eyes noticeably longer at those sets of triangles, circles and other shapes that do not logically "correspond" to each other.
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At about the third year of life, they mysteriously lose this ability, and many children have problems with abstract thinking even in older preschool age. Psychologists did not consider this unusual failure to be something bad and simply regarded it as one of the features of the development of the human mind and consciousness, associated with how language acquisition affects the perception of the surrounding world.
The observations of Walker and her colleagues showed that this is completely uncommon for children from China - the development of their abstract thinking does not stop or roll back, and at 3-4 years of age they are noticeably superior to their American peers in this regard.
Having received such strange discrepancies, scientists tried to find out how they could have been generated. After comparing the living conditions of children, Stanford psychologists came to the conclusion that all the differences between them were generated by differences in the cultures of countries, and not differences in languages, the level of parental attention or other aspects of their life.
What exactly they are expressed, scientists do not yet know, but subsequent experiments have revealed curious differences in how children from China and the United States act in situations where the logical connection is not entirely obvious. In particular, American preschoolers preferred to choose objects of the same shape in such a situation, and their counterparts from the PRC preferred different figures.
In the near future, Walker and her team plan to conduct a new series of experiments, which, psychologists hope, will help them understand what exactly generates these differences and whether the different development of abstract thinking is reflected in the mentality and values of adults in China and the United States.
