Hello All,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful posts and interesting discussion last week!
In preparration for Dr. Hsueh's talk this week, please read "A cultural perspcetive on professional beliefs of childcare teachers" (Hsueh & Barton, 2006) and write a discussion board post by 9PM Monday, September 19th. This article was recently chosen by Hsueh as a primer for his talk. It is a descriptive study looking at cultural differences. It is far less intense that the previous two weeks.
In keeping with the general theme of replication, please think about and post on the following ideas:
In what ways would replicating cognitive science research across cultures be beneficial for understanding our constructs of interest?
What challenges might cognitive scientists face when they attempt to do this?
Do you think there are any limitations/drawbacks to studying cognitive science topics across cultures?
Can you think of any examples, from your own research or research you know about, in which extending effects to other cultures might provide some useful insight into a construct of interest?
Please post your discussion as a response to this article. Afterwards, feel free to reply to others' posts.
One important note: In light of getting this paper recently, we will NOT have a group discussion. As such, you are only required to come to the public presentation at 4PM on Wednesday, September 21st. The remainder of the talks this semester will be "business as usual" (discussion post, in-person discussion, public presentation).
I will be available in our room at 3PM in case anyone wants to bring by any ideas they might have for their paper, just to get some initial feedback. Again, this is not required though.
Have a nice weekend!
Best,
I’m really bummed we’re not discussing this article in class, because I thought it was fascinating! Developmental psychology is especially cognizant of cultural influences, and I enjoy reading about differences in culture and how they influence various aspects of child development.
ReplyDeleteCulture is difficult to define. Dr. Cohen, in my opinion, gives the best description: “Culture is the way we bring the past into the present as a way to preserve the future.” Its influence is far reaching, as evidenced in the article we read this week for class. Preschool teachers admitted that when they were in the classroom, they relied less on their formal education and more on their personal experiences and cultural norms. As a former preschool teacher, I can attest that this is accurate.
In terms of replication for the current study, I would be interested to see the same methodology applied to a more diverse sample of preschool teachers. They were all from one unnamed metropolitan area, and I would argue that there might be discreet cultural differences between different regions of the United States. For example, preschool teachers in the northeast might have different classroom goals and expectations for their students than preschool teachers in Hawaii. However, higher education could possibly control for that.
Cultural replication is common in social and developmental psychology. I am not familiar with cultural replication in cognitive science. I’m unsure as to how much could really be accomplished by cultural replication in this field. In my limited understanding of cognitive processes, it seems that there is a “normal” or typical way that most people’s brains are structured and function. I think that cultural replication could serve to reinforce previous findings, but I don’t really know how it could question or challenge them. An obvious challenge faced when conducting a replication is keeping methodology consistent, which would be compromised even more when considering language and cultural differences.
Eliza,
DeleteI almost used Dr. Cohen's explanation of culture in my post. I'm so glad you brought it up here!
This article was definitely much easier to swallow than the previous articles, but also very interesting. At my undergraduate university, I was an athlete and was “in the same circle” with many foreign athletes. Athletes from all over Europe, South America and Asia came to America to play a sport while pursuing an education. Before meeting these people, I had little to no interaction with people from cultures substantially different than mine. I had given little thought to different cultural norms, but I had definitely not thought of how these differences would play out in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I am mostly interested in cognition, culture has always been an interesting topic. It seems strange to me that we as humans create these constructs for ourselves and that these constructs then proceed to dominate our lives and serve as the basis for was we view as normal or abnormal. When it comes to the teachers in the study, they criticized the Chinese classroom because it was abnormal to them, not necessarily because there was anything innately wrong with it. The children were probably not in any danger, they were most likely not being abused, but the teachers in the study still criticized the classroom looking through the lens of their own cultural biases.
I think this plays into cognition nicely as most of our thinking processes are influenced by these cultural norms and values that we hold dear. Replicating cognitive studies across cultures seems very valuable to me. It would be interesting to see if cognitive processes that we currently see as normal or consistent among individuals would hold across cultures. How people think, acquire knowledge, and understand the world around them is almost always influenced by the culture they experience, which goes back to the age-old nature/nurture argument.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed this article. I think it brings up a number of issues in science, really with the world in general, and shows that humans have a difficult time looking beyond their cultural biases and viewing the world in an objective manner.
I would first like to say that I very much enjoyed this article. It could be my minor in child development, but I found the article to be a great representation of replication for this class as well as very easy to comprehend. We can see how they kept with the same general tone as some previous research, but they were able to uncover some developed differences within their study. I personally found that the article was able to communicate that most participants in this study, despite education level or teaching experience, are able to agree among common threads of preschool education. It is the differences, such as a shift in the importance of verbal communication, that allow for a developmental perspective of cultural beliefs regarding preschool to be understood.
ReplyDeleteI am also fortunate enough to say that I was a preschool teacher for short time in my life as well as a full time nanny for many years. For me, understanding that cultural norms play a large role in cognition is not strange, in fact I immediately begin to think of Vygotsky’s work with cognition and language in terms of child development. Again I bring up the shift in the importance of verbal communication in the last twenty years, Vygotsky places a lot of emphasis on the role of parents, language, and culture on the cognitive development of children. The three types of speech he dissects in his work show that language and communication are directly related to our own cognitive processes. An adult has a much more mature cognitive ability than children, and their language and verbal communication often reflect cognitive beliefs and thoughts that they hold. So when a child is verbally communicating with their teacher, there is an exchange of cognitive understanding that is embedded in the language and construction of the conversation. This understanding is directed both ways, as the child is influenced by the teacher’s cognition and the teacher by the child’s. I find this so interesting and I feel this has been highlighted more and more in relationship to child development and education in more recent years.
One aspect of the study I found a little foreign is regarding the third question explored “What are the most important qualities of a teacher?”, but not that the responses remained constant with the first study. In their explanation for this similarity, there is reference to anthropologists and cultural psychologists view of personality and cultural as separate but mutually influential systems. I know that a person’s personality is directly influenced and shaped by their culture and cultural beliefs, but I am not sure I comprehend how the two are “mutually influential system”? I would be interested to hear some feedback from those of you who understand this aspect of the study a little better.
I really enjoyed that this article was a change of pace from what we had been previously reading as I enjoyed a new perspective on a field near and dear to my heart—I’ve worked as a preschool teacher and teacher’s assistant in the past. I particularly find cross cultural research fascinating in that, especially in education, it really all depends on your children and the setting as what works for one class may be completely ineffective for another class. In this sense, this makes replication of early childhood education research, or educational research in general, particularly challenging. I found it interesting that the main purpose of this research was basically a replication of work done 20 years prior in order to gauge how dynamic preschool teacher’s beliefs were over time and how these beliefs may shape evaluations of a Chinese classroom.
ReplyDeleteI found it particularly surprising that educators were surprised at how different the Chines classroom was structured and how the teachers taught and interacted with children. I almost felt that these teachers were being ignorant of the fact that this was an ENTIRELY different class composed of very different values and upbringings and the education system would most certainly reflect those differences. You also have to take into consideration the very different cultures when comparing an eastern culture to a western culture which I felt the teachers were not bearing in mind when giving their evaluations.
As far as the replication results go, I found it interesting that teacher’s evaluations of what they felt were most important fluctuated to reflect the current state of the different societies. Our society was and still continues to trend toward an individualistic and further and further away from a collectivist mindset. It looks as if this notion is understood and emphasized as early as preschool which I found both interesting and slightly alarming to a certain degree.
This article was definitely a nice break from the very technical ones we started off with. Their approach to studying cultural beliefs was an interesting one.
ReplyDeleteThe article also made me think of other contexts in which examining across cultures would be beneficial. Replicating studies in different cultural contexts can help validate claims of generalizability (is the phenomenon global or does it vary by culture?). This, of course, would be beneficial I think to any area of cognitive science, and can reveal how culture has an effect on cognitive processes. This makes me think particularly of one study I’ve been working on (with Daniel, actually) that examined the effect of emotion on distractibility using EEG. It would be interesting to do this study within a culture that generally encourages emotion suppression to see if we find the same type of effect, which could help validate our conclusion that emotional states of an individual can reduce attention to distractors. On the flipside, if our findings weren’t replicated we could compare the different cultures’ results and examine if subjective ratings of emotion and arousal could account for such an incident, and if not, what was actually going on? Could growing in a society where outward emotion is to be suppressed actually affect internal processes? Not replicating findings could lead to more research questions, which isn’t a bad thing.
Replicating cognitive studies across cultures can not only lead to learning more about cognitive processes in general, but also about how culture affects cognition.
This article is very interesting to me because as a Chinese student who is studying in a foreign country, I can see and feel how different cultures influence people’ beliefs and behavior. Also, I am currently working in a preschool as a graduate assistant, so I am very lucky to experience the cultural differences on preschool teachers’ professional perspectives on early childhood education.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think it is very important to replicate cognitive science research across culture because the same construct might be understood differently and operationalized differently in other culture. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory indicates that individuals are influenced by their interactions with the changing environment in both direct and indirect ways. For example, in the article, in response to the question why should a society have preschools, three preferences differ in frequency order and percentage from the previous study that was conducted 20 years ago, the reasons that authors believe are regional, ethnic, educational level and economic background of teachers, and the change of sociopolitical and cultural beliefs. Even in the same country, teachers’ professional beliefs vary, not to mention teachers’ professional beliefs from another country. So replicating cognitive studies in different social and cultural context can expand our understanding about the constructs of interests.
As regard to the challenges might cognitive scientists face when conducting cross cultural studies, one could be the influence of language. I remembered a true story told by Dr. Hsueh in his Early Childhood Development course, when he was doing a summative research on the effect of an American educational program on Chinese preschoolers, one barrier is that the translated version of math section from the original American educational program could not be used for testing the same age group of Chinese preschoolers, because they had been able to count numbers over certain level. One of the important reasons is that in Chinese, pronunciations of numbers above 10 has the same structure as all two-digit numbers, so the numbers in Chinese are easy to learned and remembered by Chinese preschoolers. From this example, we can see that different language system in another culture can influence students’ information processing when learning, so the influence of language should be considered when studying cognitive science across cultures.
Week 5 Reading Response
ReplyDeleteI wish this study had gone more in depth into the difference between the preschool programs. It said no significant difference was found between each of the 3 and the general consensus, but I’d be interested in seeing just how the breakdown was. Did it approach significance? Were the top 3 choices mirrored among each of the preschools? It’s possible each had a different top 3 and it just happened to add up in a way where these top 3 were the general top 3. I hope that makes as much sense as it does in my head.
I think this study does well in its effort at replication of the Tobin et al. study. It shows that cultural changes can lead to differing emphases in education. It also shows the difference that sampling population can make. I appreciated how the authors presented multiple options without a definitive “This is why it changed” outlook. I think they could have gone further with the replication by having preschool teachers from more than 3 kinds of preschools. I’m also curious if the results could be reversible. That is, what if we did a similar study but showed a video of an American preschool classroom to Chinese preschool teachers?
This study was somewhat like a replication in the sense that they built off of the method of an earlier article but used a new sample of participants and completed it two decades later. This reminded me of something from the first two articles that we read for this class during the second week about how research done in certain fields, like social psychology, is difficult to replicate over time because time leads to so many changes in humans. In this study, the researchers were not so much trying to “replicate” the previous study in the strict sense of the word as they were trying to using the difference in time period to their advantage by looking for differences between the results of the original study in the 1980s and the current study that they were doing in 2006.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I appreciated about this study was that the authors recognized and pointed out that any difference that they found between the current study and the original study could just be due to a difference in sampling and may not necessarily be because of any change in cultural attitudes and beliefs that occurred since the time that the original study was conducted. This was similar to when Phil had brought up during one of the earlier talks that you can never completely, directly replicate a study unless you use the same exact participants.
I found it hard to believe that that the participants’ beliefs did not change much since the original study. The differences that they did find between the institution types are tough to unpack though because institution was confounded with education level. So it is unclear which is driving the effect. Another variable that I think would be interesting to see in this study (though it may tie in to education level) is the age of the educators who participated.
Having been the former president of the International Student Association at the university (in addition to studying abroad in China) and having taken quite a few anthropology and child developmental classes in undergrad, I found this article to be a nice weaving together of many different dimensions that I’m familiar with. Culture is such a fascinating topic, partly because of its pervasiveness, but perhaps more so due to its huge impact on so many facets of life—which most certainly includes cognition and many other domains spanned by cognitive science.
ReplyDeleteObviously, replicating cognitive science across cultures almost immediately has appeal insofar is it lends credibility to the theories that are proposed by disentangling possible cultural and environmental factors as confounds. If you were to attempt to replicate an experiment with populations of varying cultures, and yet the result still remains the same, there is certainly an element of reinforcing the proposed models.
I think that there are clearly some challenges to doing this sort of cross-cultural research, mainly because it requires a research team that has the funding and cultural-competence needed to successfully perform a replication. The task of finding people who are all within the same exact cultural group is also difficult, mainly because there are many cultures even within the same regions.
Perhaps some of the limitations to studying cross-culturally would be that there might be some methodological issues that get lost in translation, or perhaps there might be certain cultural warrants that confound the results, without necessarily accurately disproving theoretical concepts.
This week’s article touched on topics important for replication that the previous articles did not, namely the influence of inter- and intra-group cultural differences on research findings. While it is generally understood that culture has an impact on psychological processes and beliefs, I am glad that this article incites one to consider to what extent such processes are altered by culture. Particularly when one is hoping to uncover fundamental processes generalizable to all humans, the question of to what extent and under what conditions processes function differently across groups becomes tantamount. In the present study, I thought that seeing both areas of consistency (e.g. why a society should have preschools) and variability (e.g. criticisms of Chinese preschools) across the participants emphasized the nuances of culture. This highlights the vast complexity of culture, as research may be equally as impacted by differences in education, community characteristics, etc., within one certain group as differences in broader cultural groups. Such understandings are important, because it is all too easy to form broad characterizations of cultural groups when conducting and discussing/interpreting research. While egregious stereotypes are typically avoided, there are other generalizations, some more founded than others, that bleed into interpretations in subtler ways as well. For instance, the characterization of “westerners”(a nebulous categorization) as individualistic and internally-driven and “easterners” (equally nebulous) as collectivistic and more socially driven are not uncommon in many interpretations of discrepant findings. Yet, such a dichotomization masks the actual variability that exists within cultural groups while also neglecting cultural shifts, some of which occur at a rapid pace. This is further compounded in a domain such as education, when policy may have an immediate impact on behavior and dialogue, even if discrepant from one’s personal opinions. In terms of replication, I believe this shows the extent to which researchers must consider cultural differences. If one neglects cultural differences, either between groups or within groups, there is a far greater chance of replication failing unexpectedly or nuanced differences going unaccounted. Further, if replication does fail, an understanding of differences is crucial in order to discuss findings in a way that is useful.
ReplyDeleteOne brief personal example regarding replication across cultures is with motivation. In a past conversation with Dr. Hsueh regarding motivation research in China, he brought to light an important barrier to replicating American findings: namely that there was no accurate translation of “motivation” into Chinese. While one phrase was commonly given to describe motivation, it did not have the same meaning; the core ideas underlying the American conceptualization of motivation were fundamentally different than the ideas seen in Chinese culture and research. While it was possible to communicate the concept of motivation as we conceive it, doing so would produce results that do not genuinely capture the phenomenon for the culture of interest. Thus, one is faced with the question of how to make findings most meaningful within context, as well as for a broader understanding.
I think that replication across cultures is imperative in cognitive science. It is important in understanding cultural influences on operational definitions and constructs across many groups of people and in particular, when different languages are spoken. Some concepts might not have direct translations or may carry unintended social weight when translated or applied in a new social context. This makes replication key to understanding in that if we are not finding the same results between cultures, it might indicate that definitions and operationalizations need to be modified to be more culturally appropriate or sensitive. I think that the culmination of language and culture is an important aspect of cross-culture cognitive science. Does language have an impact on cognitive processes? An example of what I mean was brought up in our last class when Michael was talking about how in cultures where there was no word for specific colors, people in that culture could not tell the difference between those colors and closely related colors (e.g. red/orange).
ReplyDeleteOne challenge researchers might face when attempting to replicate across cultures is simply the vast number of cultures and subcultures would make it very difficult to generalize the findings of a cross-cultural study. In this study, even how the children were expected to behave was suprising to the participants which shows that there are cultural differences that need to be accounted fo r before generalizations can be made. This makes replication very difficult, particularly when looking at vastly different cultures. This does not only apply on the state-level. Even within the United States, there are cultural differences based on geographic area. For example, in the north, if you call a woman ma'am, it is seen as sarcastic or rude (think of it as roughly the equivalent of calling her old). In the south, it is considered rude NOT to call her ma'am. Now, this is not a particular useful difference in cognitive science, but it does illustrate how these differences can be expressed.
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ReplyDeleteReplicating results in cognitive science across cultures presents a number of very interesting strengths and limitations. Ultimately, this seems almost entirely dependent on the questions being asked. For those studies which seek to understand the mechanisms underlying a cognitive process, it seems unlikely that they should be influenced much by cultural differences. For example, although different values, beliefs, and customs may be different in another culture, it is unlikely that their memory functions in a completely different way. What may be seen, however, is differences in association between concepts. As such, it may be useful to understand how or why responses would change, depending on culture.
ReplyDeleteConversely, however, the core processes underlying cognition do not seem like they would change across culture, particularly for larger, more theoretical, processes (e.g. working memory), as opposed to specific measures (e.g. IQ) or observations, which likely would change. For this reason, if a researcher was familiar with the norms and practices in a given culture, they could easily design a study which examines a given phenomenon in a culturally-appropriate manner or choose a similar, but culturally appropriate, measure to investigate one of these processes.
Furthermore, there are some areas which are so interwoven with culture, that cross-cultural studies seem like the most useful means to disentangle the biological or cognitive processes underlying a phenomenon. Music perception is one of these cases. Most individuals in the U.S., regardless of how familiar they are with a given genre or instrumentation would share a similar response to specific types of music. They would likely be able to identify if a song is “happy” or “sad” or “angry” or any of a number of other affective qualities. Even more intriguing, is how individuals would feel (i.e. how they emotionally respond) from the music within the culture, as opposed to cross-culturally.
A number of studies have sought to examine this through cross-cultural comparison because it seems the most plausible means to do so (e.g. Balkwill et al., 2004: see link below). In the Balkwill et al. work, for example, musicians from several different countries played music they thought best represented a given emotion (e.g., sadness). They then had individuals judge these pieces to determine what emotion was being portrayed. From this analysis, they then went on to try to look for the factors which predicted the perceived emotion (e.g. timbre, tempo).
Examinations like this are particularly useful as we live in an extremely globalized society with a strong Western influence. That is not to say that each country lacks diversity in art, history, culture, or other areas; however, the number of groups which have had no direct influence with larger society is tremendously low. While each country and culture does possess its own individuality, the powerful economic influence of the west is seen across the world (for instance, there are McDonalds in about 120 countries) and this includes media and entertainment. As such, it is unlikely that a German participant, for instance, would not know that a certain American pop song was meant to be sad, which may bias their perception. Anecdotally, I have seen this even in extremely rural Western Ukraine, where a handful of people even speak English, yet one frequently hears American “rock and roll” (quotes used here, as their genre definitions do tend to be slightly different).
For the reasons discussed here, cross-cultural investigations provide a number of benefits. They allow researchers to better understand how fundamental and universal a certain process is, as well as allowing researchers to “look beyond culture,” in a way, to try to get to the core of these phenomena which are so closely tied to cultural experience.
Balkwill et al. (2004): http://www.psy.mq.edu.au/me2/uploads/publications/recognition_of_emotion.pdf
DeleteThe rarity of non-contacted peoples: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24090-how-many-uncontacted-tribes-are-left-in-the-world/
I believe that culture plays an undeniable role in cognition, and that it can be easy to overlook. Here we are presented with some great evidence as to just how culture can impact our perceptions and responses. Our interaction and socialization within our own culture frames our very thoughts. American social norms and cultural expectations regarding children and childcare obviously shaped responses to the Chinese daycare video.
ReplyDeleteWhile culture is important to consider (especially in replication), I believe it must be approached carefully. Culture is an important social context that frames how individuals behave, learn, think, and interact. When we attempt to study something like Cognition that largely relies on indirect measures, we should be careful how we approach cultural issues. It can be easy to rely on essentialism which can lead to bad generalizations and reductionism.
Although approaching culture can prove challenging, culture can provide interesting explanations when direct replications fail. Context can significantly change effects. Rather than take a failure of replication as a sign of something wrong about the claims being investigated, it should be viewed as a chance to find interesting factors that explain why the failure occurred.
ReplyDeleteDr Hsueh’s article is very interesting to me. I see the preschool teacher’s cultural belief being an international student and research young children. For instance, in US preschool teacher give a lot of independence (e.g. doing a fraction in multiple ways) to their students in terms of teaching learning experience. However, in other culture that might not be possible (e.g. my preschool teachers were more score oriented). And preschool is such an important stage of human development where cultural preservation could bring lot of social changes.
In response to the first question I would like to say replicating cognitive science research across cultures is very important because that helps to understand other culture constructs of interest and how other people think. For instance, if a teacher from china use the word “boarding school” that might be very much understandable to very body because in china there are lots of boarding school. But in US if a preschool teacher says “boarding school” that might not be well understandable to the parents because in US people have no idea about the boarding school. On the top of that there a lot of other believe (i.e. regional, ethnic) which may replicate lots of changes in the epistemological thinking of students as well as the belief of the teachers.
Cognitive scientists might face difficulties when they face cross culture research. Last semester I used PISA data set to see math teacher’s belief across different culture. From that study experience I see a lot of cross cultural researcher mentioned that, in US, teachers give importance on student’s good command of knowing all the formulas where in china teachers give importance on giving the right answer of the problem. So this is making a gap between this two culture in terms of math achievement of this two culture students (e.g. in PSIA 2016, China is in top 5 where US is below 20 in ranking).
One of the limitation of this study is taking small sample size or sampling error when doing cross cultural study. Because there might be lot of changes even with in small ethnic group when people do research with cross culture. For instance, a Chakma (ethnic group in Asia) teacher belief drinking the from Nijhum fall is a blessing for their community but an urban teacher see this as a bad drinking water and which is not good for health.
I don't have well-established knowledge about education, especially child education, however, this article was interesting to read. As one of the international students, I am aware of that it is tricky to bring up a topic of cultural variances or cultural relativism. Needless to say, we have to try to keep mutual respectiveness in mind to avoid unnecessary conflicts, yet, nevertheless, it is not easy to put other's shoes with taking mine away.
ReplyDeleteFor that reason, educators decided to educate us be respectful to different cultures. It was somewhat interesting that more highly educated group of preschool educators showed more criticism. It seems that high professional standard prevailed general agreement.
As we can see from the one of results, cultural distance is hard to overcome. Therefore, replication is important in this kind of cross-cultural study and get to have deep insight once they success. Especially conceptual replication is necessary, far more than direct replication since method should be transformed to suitable for each cultures. Specifically, due to the feature of cognitive science, investigating human mind, cognitive replication in cross-cultural study seems hard to deal with. But if make it possible, this is the place that a replication, especially conceptual replication, has the most powerful effect.
This paper reported the results of a study based on the materials of a previous study on how cultural beliefs of educators impact their professional beliefs.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of replication, I couldn't imagine running a study like this and discussing the similar/different results from the original study. There are just soooo many confounding factors with this. Some big ones would be socioeconomic factors, where you are recruiting from (like in this study, one group of 86 came from the same university program... I'd expect them to be more similar than different), and some form of effect due to the participants feeling as though they are being evaluated (it did take place at their work, I think).
Also, none of the results of this study were surprising at all.
I'm interested in hearing what the speaker has to say on this topic. This area just seems incredibly difficult to study but I'm glad someone is out there doing it!
I apologize for posting late.
ReplyDeleteThe first bit of information that caught my attention was the correlation between time spent in education with critical comments about the Chinese preschool. Coupled with much of the criticism being focused on other (Chinese) teachers and teaching materials, it occurred to me that this might be related to perceived expertise: Education trains a theoretical knowledge which often does not map exactly onto expertise within the profession; especially early on in professional life, something has to give, and since theory is better bolstered by sheer quantity and time than is professional experience of the novice, whatever does not jive with theory gives first. Relatedly, Americans often treat education as a a kind of purchased expertise or credential, and coupled with our society's value on education we have a stake in our education turning out "right." Our education is of course to some degree a reflection of culturally accepted practices and is meant to be a static representation - a taste - of professional life in this country. In other words, those who spend more years in academia are more likely to think they know better than those who haven't, and this is reflected by our equation of academia with education. I wonder about generalizability and - specifically - conceptual replication. One could perform similar studies in other fields, some requiring much schooling (engineer, physicist, mathematician, anthropologist, etc.) and others more experience (craftsman, technical trades, perhaps lawyer): studies in which professionals are tested for relevant beliefs and respond to the relevantly different practices of other professionals within the same field. It might be the case that the architect, engineer, anthropologist, or other professional requiring much schooling, is more critical of other professionals within his field who do things differently, whereas the less "educated" (i.e., academic) person might be less critical. If so, these studies would constitute conceptual replication of the relationship between time spent in the academy and critique.
Next, I would like to point out that the valuation of "argument" in America is not a valuation of logical argument, otherwise we would be teaching logic sometime before college. The type of "argument" emphasized is rather a kind of ability to verbally disagree. The mantra "respect everyone's opinion" assures us that rhetorical force, logical soundness, or other kinds of objective argumentative standards are not what is in question, but rather that language is useful for a kind of expression of one's opinion, not a defense thereof. As such, the use of the term "argument" as part of an explanation of emphasis on language and communication skills is somewhat misleading, as there is effectively an equivocation on the term.
I am suspicious of the claim that teachers employ standards of personal character and experience RATHER than professional skills and expertise. In teaching, personality and expertise are both important. If one of these aspects are seen as lacking, it makes sense for one's reports to call attention to that aspect. A question though is what may be behind the seeing of an absence of one aspect rather than another? Here, the authors seem right to leverage cultural differences, but we might also leverage the related differences in expressive behavior across cultures and therefore the ability to pick up on that behavior outside of one's own culture.