Analogical reasoning among Chinese international students in the United States.

29 pagesAccording to influential studies in cultural psychology, Westerners are more capable of abstract thinking, as indicated by an advantage in formal and rule-based reasoning. Contrary to this view, recent studies show that East Asians construed events more abstractly than Westerners, and performed better a test of analogical reasoning, suggesting that East Asian people tend to think more abstractly in these ways. Here we tested whether exposure to a Western culture changes Chinese students’ analogical reasoning. We measured analogical reasoning using the Standard Progressive Matrices test (SPM; Raven, 2003) in 327 Chinese international students enrolled in US college or university programs. Results showed that Chinese international students in the US had higher scores on the SPM test than both native Chinese and US Caucasian samples collected from a previous SPM study (Singh, Su, & Casasanto, 2020). These data corroborate previous results showing Chinese participants’ advantage in analogical reasoning over US participants’, and also show that this difference does not depend on either the language of the test or the country in which the participants were tested. However, we did not observe any significant relationship between Chinese international students’ SPM performance and the amount of time they had spent in the US. We discuss potential reasons why analogical reasoning abilities may differ across cultures but remain stable within individuals over time despite exposure to a new culture