Culture and Human Inference

Peng, Ames, Knowles

Two decades ago. American social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross published their now classic book. Human Inference, a broad survey of how judgments, particularly about the social world, unfold from evidence and reasoning (Nisbett & Ross. 1980). Roy D’Andrade. a notable cognitive anthropologist, read the book and pronounced it a ”good ethnography.” The authors were dismayed: they thought they had written a universal of account of inference and cognition, describing social judgment processes in a relatively timeless and culture-free way. Most of their colleagues at the time agreed. However, in the ensuing twenty years, cultural psychology has blossomed, some of it pursued by Nisbett and Ross themselves. The accumulating evidence on cultural differences in inference is clear and Nisbett and Ross now agree that their original work amounts to a something of an ethnographic study of inference in a single culture, the United States (see Nisbett. Peng. Choi. & Norenzayan. in press).