Random Thoughts Thread

[Viking]

Suppose you are asked to name the two related items in a list of words such as “train, bus, track”. What would you say? This is known as the “triad test”, and people in the West might pick

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

“bus” and “train” because they are both types of vehicles. A holistic thinker, in contrast, would say “train” and “track”, since they are focusing on the functional relationship between the two – one item is essential for the other’s job.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2017...different-ways

Afraid I picked the Asian answer.

[Montmorency]

No reason to accept that.

The only English paper I could find even briefly mentioning a "train track bus" triad in crosscultural context was here, and it describes differences between East and West Europeans, who both tend to make the "thematic" (i.e. train-track) selection over the taxonomic (i.e. train-bus) one, West Europeans more pronounced than East. Beyond the poor theoretical grounds, then, this directly contradicts the BBC exposition on "Eastern" vs. "Western" analogies.

Bad BBC. Bad.

[Viking]

Well, an article published in Science that is linked to in the BBC article mentions that triad:

Our main dependent variable was a common measure of cultural thought, the triad task (17). The triad task shows participants lists of three items, such as train, bus, and tracks. Participants decide which two items should be paired together. Two of the items can be paired because they belong to the same abstract category (train and bus belong to the category vehicles), and two because they share a functional relationship (trains run on tracks). People from Western and individualistic cultures choose more abstract (analytic) pairings, whereas East Asians and people from other collectivistic cultures choose more relational (holistic) pairings (1, 17). We report scores as a percentage of holistic choices, where 100% is completely holistic and 0% is completely analytic.

Can't make your link work, though I found the paper here.

[Montmorency]

Well, an article published in Science that is linked to in the BBC article mentions that triad:



Can't make your link work, though I found the paper here.

Some problems with the rice and wheat hypothesis:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Talhelm et al. (2014) reported an interesting investigation on the psychological differences between
Southern and Northern Han Chinese populations in China. By interviewing 1162 undergraduate
students from different regions, the authors showed that the Chinese from the southern “ricegrowing
area” are more holistic-thinking and interdependent, while the Chinese from the northern
“wheat-growing area” are more analytic-thinking and independent. These psychological differences
can be explained by the differences between rice and wheat farming, not the modernization theory.
The authors suggested that this “rice vs. wheat” theory can partially explain the different thought
styles between Eastern and Western people, and the persistent interdependence of wealthy East
Asia.

When comparing
wheat with rice statistics, the authors grouped the corn and soybeans farming area with the wheat
area (Talhelm et al., 2014). This simplified method may be valid when wheat dominates over corn
and soybeans, however, this does not uniformly occur in Northern China

These results suggest that there would be an equal chance for corn farming to affect population
psychology in Northern China. The term “rice vs. wheat agriculture” coined by Talhelm et al.
(2014) cannot accurately reflect their findings. From their data, it seems to be more appropriate to
attribute the psychological differences to “rice vs. non-rice agriculture”.

However,
the amendment of “rice vs. wheat agriculture” to “rice vs.
non-rice agriculture” in the hypothesis would lead to different
implications.
Thus the theory would then predict that there should be
psychological differences between rice-growing East/South East
Asian and the rest of world. This prediction is inconsistent
with the dominant view in psychology that Western populations
show different psychological traits as compared with nonWestern
populations. Non-Westerns, which include groups as
diverse as Arabs, East Asians, Russians, and farmers in Africa
and South America, have been shown to rely more on holistic
reasoning and have more interdependent views of self than
Westerners (Henrich et al., 2010).
t for many of these non-Westerners, e.g., people from
the South and Middle America, and Middle East regions, nonrice
crops such as corn or wheat are dominant over rice.
According to the “rice vs. non-rice agriculture” theory, they
are expected to be more similar to Westerners. However, it
has been shown that these people demonstrate the same level
of, or increased holistic processing and collectivism as compared
to Chinese people (Allik and Realo, 2004; Henrich et al.,
2010).

The analysis of current and future
data should focus on the impact of different production costs of
different agricultures, instead of these agricultures themselves, on
individualism vs. collectivism

As for the triad, these terms are quite something to unpack. The Central/East vs. West European article uses the terms "taxonomic" (train-bus) vs. "thematic" (train-track), while Science/BBC use for the same "holistic" vs. "abstract/analytic" or "categorical" vs. "functional". In the JCC paper (my link), their Europeans choose what the Science authors calls holistic/functional (>thematic?), which should apparently be chosen by Asians and non-Westerners. Questionable application of terminology at the least. Anyway, the references they provide for this claim are earlier papers by the same authors. Here is 2001 and 2004. 2001 is not pertinent to the triad but delves into their idea of a holistic/analytical distinction. Don't really care to read it unless you want to discuss that. 2004 deals with triads but does not include the train-bus triad. Irritatingly, they do not present the actual experimental items/triads beyond a few mentions. They only present graphs of the transformed results from the implied data.

Here are some of the triads they do mention:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

There were 10 sets of test items and 10 sets of fillers. The three words in
each testing set could be grouped on the basis of thematic relations,
categorical relations, or neither. Participants’ groupings were coded as
relational if they suggested an object–context or subject–object relationship,
such as monkey and bananas, shampoo and hair, or conditioner and
hair. Groupings were coded as categorical if they suggested shared features
or category memberships, for example, monkey and panda or shampoo and
conditioner. Similarly, participants’ explanations were coded as either
relational (e.g., “Monkeys eat bananas”) or categorical (e.g., “Monkeys and
pandas are both animals”). Examples for filler items included child–
teenager–adult and Monday–Wednesday–Friday.
Within each of the 10 testing sets, there were 3 possible ways for
participants to select two items. In total, there were 30 possible ways of
grouping, 14 of which were coded as relational (such as policeman and
uniform, and postman and uniform) and 11 of which were coded as
categorical (such as policeman and postman). Thus, the stimuli were biased
toward relational grouping.
The Americans were tested in English, and the Chinese were tested in
either English or Chinese, as randomly assigned. Ideally, it would be very
informative if we could have recruited American bilinguals who could read
and write in both English and Chinese, but that turned out to be an almost
impossible task because of the great difficulty of finding such people, even
on the campus of a large U.S. university

So: monkey/panda/banana (no monkey/panda/bamboo?), shampoo/conditioner/hair, and policeman/postman/uniform. Then:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In Study 1, participants had more opportunities
to group objects on the basis of relationships than on the basis of
categories within each set. For example, selecting postman and uniform or
policeman and uniform would both be considered relational, whereas there
was only one way to be categorical, that is, selecting postman and policeman.
This resulted in a possible bias toward relational grouping overall. In
Study 2, we presented more balanced sets so that within each set only one
relational and one categorical grouping could be made. We designed two
grouping tests in the same format as the test used in Study 1. In each test,
there were 8 test items, such as carrot–rabbit–eggplant and teacher–
doctor–homework, and 10 filler items. We counterbalanced the language
used in testing, the test versions, and the testing order.

No explanation of Chinese items. Were they direct translations/counterparts of the English? I didn't see anything about checking individual-triad comparisons between groups or between individuals. And, given the performance of Europeans in the other study opposite to that predicted by this model, what about the Europeans? Who were these "European-Americans", and where did they live and where did their ancestors hail from (in light of distinction between Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and American Chinese)?

[Viking]

Not familiar with the subject; just wanted to point out the Science article.

[Montmorency]

I'm sorry.

[Husar]

Montmorency should be sorry indeed.