Categorization.

Among the cognitive processes that are building blocks in cognition and intelligence probably the most elementary is categorization. People categorize on the basis of similarity placing into categories objects that have something in common. The process of categorization is universal and has been observed in all cultures. People categorize in order to reduce the complexity of the world and provide the psychological means to react to stimuli and make appropriate decisions. Language is essentially based on categorization as the development of concepts is symbolic of communalities in our environment. We have already noted the universality of facial expressions and their common meaning across cultures. More complex verbal behaviors are also categorized as we can see in the case of stereotypes, the generalized beliefs we hold of other cultural groups and people. In fact categorization is the most elementary way we discriminate. Stereotypes attribute to an entire cultural category what we believe are common traits and is the lazy person’s response to a complex multifaceted world. In fact it takes very little to categorize, particularly between ingroup and outgroup members. The mere membership in another group is sufficient to create a negative bias. The so-called minimal categorization design studies demonstrated that even groups that are nonsensical produce discriminatory categorical behavior (Doise, Csepeli, Dann, Gouge, Larsen, & Ostell, 1972).

Cross-cultural differences in categorization have been demonstrated. For example one study showed that adult Africans tended to categorize objects on the basis of color rather than function reflecting the importance of color identification of objects in that cultural context (Suchman, 1966). Western respondents tend to categorize on the basis of shared features. For example in pictorial stimuli of a man, a woman and child, Western respondents would place the man and woman together because they are both adults, whereas East Asians would put the child together with the adult because of their functional relationship as a family (Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004). The culture provides the context for categorization and respondents classify objects together based on these cultural experiences (Wassmann & Dasen, 1994). It is the degree of familiarity with environmental objects that become the basis for categorization that is also largely influenced by the cultural educational system (Mishra, 1997).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 791