Cultural Differences Of Property Effect In Inductive Reasoning Postgraduate Of Developmental And Educational Psychology

Property effect is an important psychological effect of inductive reasoning, which suggested that people could base on the most correlative background relations in property reasoning and the greater correlation, the greater possibility of reasoning is. But all studies about property effect were implemented in western people, whether the eastern people also had the property effect in inductive reasoning is unknown now. So in this study we will examine there was property effect or not in Chinese Undergraduate students, and if there is whether its characterized is the same as the West or whether there are unique features.Our study is consisted of two experiments:the first experiment, in which we take the taxonomic relations, ecological relations, and unrelated animals as reasoning contexts and ask the subjects to reasoning about the properties of genes X or disease Y between two animals, is to investigate whether the Chinese show property effect in reasoning, and if there is the contribution of different relations in Chinese's reasoning are different from the westerner. In the second experiment, the task is same to the first experiment, but the reasoning context is different, the ecological related items are replaced by preyed related items, by which we are to test whether the results of reasoning in Chinese are change with the reasoning context.The result reveled that:(1) property effect is universal in different cultures, the Chinese college students were shown the significant interaction between the properties and the types of items in reasoning as the westerners. (2) although compared to Westerners, Chinese people are prefer to external scenarios relation in category in some degree, but they were not shown a preference for the external relations in reasoning, their reasoning result was entirely depended on the correlation between the item relations and the properties in reasoning. (3) By the affect of the whole thinking and dialectical thinking in traditional Chinese culture, the Chinese college students' reasoning results were affected by the reasoning contexts.