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In 1994, America took a giant step backward in understanding intelligence and how it can be cultivated. Richard Herrnstein, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and Charles Murray, a political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, published "The Bell Curve," a best-selling book that was controversial among researchers, but was given enormous, uncritical attention in the popular press. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of "The Bell Curve." Even people who never read the book picked up its conclusions from press accounts and from discussions with people who read it. The impact on policymakers was substantial, and many practicing educators today accept the views about intelligence presented in the book and fostered by the media. The conclusions that many people drew from the book were that IQ tests are an accurate and largely sufficient measure of intelligence, that IQ is primarily genetically controlled, that IQ is little influenced by environmental factors, that racial differences in IQ are likely due at least in part, and perhaps in large part, to genetics, and that educational and other interventions have little impact on IQ and little effect on racial differences in IQ. "The Bell Curve" encouraged skepticism about the ability of public policy initiatives to have much impact on IQ or IQ-related outcomes. But in fact, "all of the conclusions the author has just summarized are mistaken." Even at the time the book was published, many cognitive scientists believed that some of these conclusions were erroneous. Now one knows that all of them are. In this article, the author will describe the new knowledge that is most relevant to educators. The basic conclusions are that environmental factors are much more important in determining intelligence than previously believed, that racial group differences owe little or nothing to genes, and that interventions, including school, influence intelligence at every level from prenatal care to college and beyond. (Contains 77 endnotes.)

You read in the paper this morning that people who take multivitamins have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to get cancer than people who don't. Does this information make you more likely to want to take multivitamins? To truly prepare students for life, schools need to teach them the critical thinking skills they need to answer questions like this one, writes Richard E. Nisbett. A number of basic thinking skills commonly taught in courses like microeconomics, statistics, psychology, and philosophy can help people solve everyday problems, reason about common life events, and evaluate claims made by the media, politicians, and advertisers. Nisbett discusses examples like confounded variables (behavioral science); the law of sunk costs (economics); and the law of large numbers (statistics). He recommends that schools make room in the curriculum to teach these principles and to show students how they apply to daily life.

One important principle of social psychology, writes Nisbett, is that some big-seeming interventions have little or no effect. This article discusses a number of cases from the field of education that confirm this principle. For example, Head Start seems like a big intervention, but research has indicated that its effects on academic achievement gaps are slight because it is not always implemented well. Fortunately, research has also found that some even bigger preschool interventions, such as the Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project, do produce large effects. On the school level, Nisbett asserts that charter schools in general do not necessarily produce positive effects, but that certain intensive types of charter schools--for example, KIPP schools--do. Nisbett also discusses a second principle of social psychology--that small interventions sometimes produce large effects. He gives several examples, such as Carol Dweck's work, which teaches students that they can increase their intelligence through their own efforts. The author concludes that to close achievement gaps, we need to be far-sighted enough to invest in very big interventions that are effective--and creative enough to consider small interventions as well.

Research on perception and cognition suggests that whereas East Asians view the world holistically, attending to the entire field and relations among objects, Westerners view the world analytically, focusing on the attributes of salient objects. These propositions were examined in the change-blindness paradigm. Research in that paradigm finds American participants to be more sensitive to changes in focal objects than to changes in the periphery or context. We anticipated that this would be less true for East Asians and that they would be more sensitive to context changes than would Americans. We presented participants with still photos and with animated vignettes having changes in focal object information and contextual information. Compared to Americans, East Asians were more sensitive to contextual changes than to focal object changes. These results suggest that there can be cultural variation in what may seem to be basic perceptual processes.

Results of five experiments involving 212 U.S. undergraduates and 177 Chinese undergraduates and 34 U.S. graduate students and 32 Chinese graduate students show that dialectical thinking is a form of folk wisdom in Chinese culture. Chinese participants preferred dialectical proverbs containing seeming contradictions more than did U.S. students. (SLD)

Effects of undergraduate training on inductive reasoning and logic were examined. Social science training produced significant effects on statistical and methodological reasoning. Natural science and humanities training produced significant effects on conditional logic reasoning. Results indicate that reasoning is taught and generalizable. (BC)

Although U.S. culture strongly sanctions the ideal of independence, the specific ways in which independence is realized may be variable depending, among other factors, on social class. Characterized by relative scarcity of social and material resources, working-class (WC) Americans were expected to strongly value self-reliance. In contrast, with choices among abundant resources, middle-class (MC) Americans were expected to value personal control and social expansiveness. In support of this analysis, relative to their WC counterparts, MC Americans reported more support from friends and greater likelihood of giving and receiving advice but less self-reliance (Study 1). Furthermore, we found evidence that this social difference has cognitive consequences: College students with MC backgrounds were more likely than their WC counterparts were to endorse situational attributions for others' behavior (Studies 2a and 2b) as well as to show holistic visual attention (Study 3). Keywords: social class; independence; attribution; cognition; United States

Previous research has shown that when processing visual scenes, Westerners attend to salient objects and East Asians attend to the relationships between focal objects and background elements. It is possible that cross-cultural differences in attentional allocation contribute to these earlier findings. In this article, the authors investigate cultural differences in attentional allocation in two experiments, using a visual change detection paradigm. They demonstrate that East Asians are better than Americans at detecting color changes when a layout of a set of colored blocks is expanded to cover a wider region and worse when it is shrunk. East Asians are also slower than Americans are at detecting changes in the center of the screen. The data suggest that East Asians allocate their attention more broadly than Americans. The authors consider potential factors that may contribute to the development of such attention allocation differences. Keywords: culture; East Asian; Western; cognition; attention; visual working memory; context

Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study I analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East Asians and Westerners draw landscape pictures and take portrait photographs. Study 3 further investigated aesthetic preferences for portrait photographs. The results suggest that (a) traditional East Asian art has predominantly context-inclusive styles, whereas Western art has predominantly object-focused styles, and (b) contemporary members of East Asian and Western cultures maintain these culturally shaped aesthetic orientations. The findings can be explained by the relation among attention, cultural resources, and aesthetic preference. Keywords: culture; attention; East Asians; Westerners; aesthetics; visual images

The authors compared East Asians' and Americans' views of everyday social events. Research suggests that Americans tend to focus more on the self and to have a greater sense of personal agency than East Asians. The authors assessed whether, compared to East Asians, Americans emphasize main characters even when events do not involve the self and whether they see more agency or intentionality in actions, even when the actions are not their own. Whether East Asians would observe more emotions in everyday scenarios than would Americans also was investigated. In Study 1, Chinese and Americans read alleged diary entries of another person. Americans did focus more on main characters and on characters' intentionality. Study 2 replicated these results comparing Taiwanese and Americans on free recall of events concerning the self and of narratives and videos concerning others. Study 2 also found that Taiwanese made more comments about the emotional states of characters. Keywords: culture; cognition; agency; emotion; egocentric bias; intentionality

Differences in reasoning styles between Chinese and European Americans held even when controlling for the language of testing. Bilingual Chinese organized objects in a more relational and less categorical way than European Americans, whether tested in English or in Chinese. Thus, culture affects categorization independent of the testing language. Nevertheless, language affected some Chinese bilinguals' categorization, The responses of Chinese from the Mainland and Taiwan were more relational when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. Responses of Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore were equally relational when tested in Chinese and in English. Age and context of learning English are discussed to explain the differential language effects among different Chinese groups. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.