立教大學で2013年に出題された問題です。月曜日と金曜日に、パラグラフ毎に解説して參ります。
次の文を読み、下記の1～9それぞれに続くものとして、本文の内容ともっともよく合致するものを、各イ～ニから１つずつ選べ。
Do people with different cultural backgrounds think differently? The idea that they do, known as cultural relativity, was taboo for decades. According to some scholars, even raising the question whether different groups of people think differently was racist. Others argued that cultural relativity was theoretically wrongheaded ―― of course the basic workings of the human mind are universal, aren’t they?
Scientists who dared to wonder how culture shapes thought faced another challenge: How do you define “culture” and “thought”? How can these abstract notions be quantified and compared? At the turn of the 21st century, psychologist Richard Nisbett and colleagues constructed a new framework for studying cognition across cultures, summarized in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought. Whereas Westerners (Europeans and Americans) tend to think “analytically,” Easterners (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) think more “*holistically.” According to Nisbett, habits of thinking in Westerners and Easterners can be traced back to the way people conceptualized themselves, their society and the natural world in ancient Greece and ancient China.
The ancient Greeks valued public debate, and individuals who achieved victory in verbal combat were respected. The Greeks believed that they could recognize truth by applying the rules of logic, and they could understand the world by dividing nature into different categories. The ancient Chinese, by contrast, valued harmony. People earned respect by acting respectfully toward their family, community, and country. Clear achievement by individuals was not prized, it was discouraged. Formal logic played little role in reasoning. Nature was not analyzed into categories. Rather, the natural world was viewed as constantly in flow, with no clear separation between the past and the present, the living and the dead, or the animate and the inanimate ―― no clear distinction between “self” and “other.” Nisbett and colleagues wanted to find out whether these cultural differences ―― valuing independence or interdependence, focusing on distinctions or continuities ―― corresponded to fundamental differences in Easterners’ and Westerners’ perception and cognition.
Early tests seemed too poetic to convince many scientists. For instance, when asked to describe an underwater scene, American participants were likely to start off by mentioning the most prominent fish (there’s a big fish ...). By contrast, Japanese participants began by describing the surroundings (there’s a pond ...), and they were 100 percent more likely than the Americans to mention relationships between the fish and things in their environment (the big fish swam past the seaweed). According to some, however, these results could merely show that Americans and Japanese people describe things differently, not that they perceive them differently.
Further studies challenge this skeptical position. Japanese and Americans were shown a box with a vertical line inside of it. They were then shown a second box of a different size, and asked to draw a vertical line inside it that matched the one in the first box. Half of the time, participants were told to make the line “the same” as the original, meaning the same absolute length (Absolute condition). The other half of the time, they were told to draw a line that was the “same” length as the first in proportion to the surrounding box (Relative condition). Results showed that Americans were more accurate in the Absolute task, which required focusing on an individual object and ignoring its surroundings, but Japanese participants performed better on the Relative task, which required perceiving and remembering an object in its context.
In a new study, Sachiko Kiyokawa and colleagues tested whether Japanese and English participants have different habits of unconscious learning. Participants were exposed to an artificial grammar ―― a sequence of letters, which, without informing the subjects, were arranged in repeating patterns, similar to the grammatical patterns found in natural languages. But these letters were special. They were constructed to convey “glocal” information (i.e., both global and local). Big letters were made out of little letters (e.g., a big “N” made up of much smaller “B’s”). When you focus on the global wholes, you see the big letters, and when you focus locally on the individual parts, you see the little letters. The big letters were arranged in sequences, and the little letters in different sequences. Results showed that Japanese participants unconsciously learned the global patterns (in the big letters), whereas English participants learned both the global and local patterns. This result was confirmed when the sequences were made up of big and little Japanese kana rather than Roman letters, suggesting that the cross-cultural differences could not be explained by participants’ familiarity with one alphabet or another.
Importantly, when Kiyokawa and colleagues instructed participants to attend to sequences at either the global or local level, the cross-cultural difference disappeared. This result shows that Japanese participants were not less capable of learning local sequences. In fact, when instructed to focus on them, the Japanese participants learned the local patterns slightly better than their English peers. In this case, culture does not constrain what we’re able to learn, rather it biases what we are prepared to learn ―― and not learn ―― when we’re allowed to experience the world in the way that comes most naturally to us.
These findings provide some of the first evidence that culture influences unconscious thought processes. It is striking that the culture-based habit of interpreting our experiences either analytically or holistically can influence how people learn a grammar ―― a task many theorists believe human brains are universally programmed to perform. Mechanisms of grammar learning may be universal, but it appears that culture-based constraints on attention can determine how these mechanisms are applied. Beyond the lab, these findings raise questions about education in a multicultural society. Given the same input, Easterners and Westerners acquired different knowledge ―― as if the two groups had been taught two different lessons. Increasingly, U.S. classrooms include learners from both holistic and analytic cultures. Can teachers develop ways to help a culturally diverse group of students learn about both the forest and the trees?
*holistically: 総体論的に
1. The main purpose of the first paragraph is to show that the idea of cultural relativity
イ. has been criticized for various reasons.
ロ. is a basic assumption of modern research.
ハ. has a long history among scholars.
ニ. is not well understood.
2. According to the passage, the ancient Greeks were likely to value all of the following EXCEPT
イ. winning an argument.
ロ. enjoying nature without analyzing it.
ハ. thinking on their own.
ニ. finding truths by applying the rules of logic.
3. The underlined sentence, “Early tests seemed too poetic to convince many scientists” (paragraph 4), means that these tests
イ. were conducted by non-experts.
ロ. emphasized the artistic skills of the participants.
ハ. were conducted in artificial settings.
ニ. emphasized participants’ descriptions rather than perceptions.
4. The underlined word “skeptical” (paragraph 5) is closest in meaning to
イ. analytic. ロ. doubtful. ハ. relative. ニ. significant.
5. In the author’s view, Kiyokawa’s experiment shows that grammar learning mechanisms are
イ. not essential to language learning.
ロ. affected by culture.
ハ. innate.
ニ. universal.
6. The underlined word “striking” (paragraph 8) is closest in meaning to
イ. notable. ロ.obvious. ハ. uncertain. ニ. wonderful.
7. The passage suggests that
イ. learning processes are basically the same across cultures.
ロ. culture puts limits on what we’re able to learn.
ハ. experiments on learning are not very reliable.
ニ. culture influences the way we learn things.
8. The author suggests that educators in the U.S. need to
イ. train students’ analytical ability.
ロ. help students learn different kinds of thinking.
ハ. incorporate nature into teaching.
ニ. encourage students to understand international relations.
9. The most appropriate title for this passage is
イ. Cultural Differences between Japan and the West.
ロ. The Logic of Ancient Worlds.
ハ. How Culture Shapes Perception.
ニ. Current Research on Cognition and Learning.
