December 1, 2002 - Human Nature III: Do We All Think The Same Way? Members of organizations around the world continuously accumulate information, process it, make either explicit or implicit decisions, and as a result engage in some form of action or inaction. Typically, managers and others in organizations try to solve practical problems to improve organizational performance. For example, managers frequently compare sales volume from different years to see if a business is growing, search for ways to control costs, and, less frequently, use economic models to decide whether to acquire a business in an unfamiliar country.
Members of organizations also process information concerning their fellow employees, leaders, customers, and the general business environment. For example, they routinely make judgments about whether to collaborate with coworkers, if they should obey the commands of their leader, and speculate about how aggressive their competitors will be in the near future.
In other words, people in all types of organizations throughout the world perpetually engage in thinking. They even think about things that perhaps they shouldn't be thinking about like daydreaming about the weekend (past and/or future), ways to control their boss, or techniques for working less and getting paid more.
The past twenty years have witnessed major breakthroughs in research on how we think. Cognitive science has replaced earlier psychological theories such as behaviorism that disregarded thought processes and focused only on behavior.
Interesting and useful introductions to the history and topics cognitive science focuses on are Howard Gardner's The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (Basic Books 1985) and Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (Norton 1997).
From the perspective of International Organizational Behavior some interesting but difficult to answer questions are:
- Do people in different cultures think in different ways?
- How does culture affect thought processes, for example, how people make decisions?
- What role do different languages play in thought processes?
- What explains the differences or similarities in thinking across cultures?
Web Exercise
A very useful and relatively complete introduction to cognitive science is the web site Celebrities In Cognitive Science http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/cogsci.html. This site includes biographies of the "Celebrities" or leading researchers in topics general areas such as how the mind works, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology. There are biographies and summaries of research by influential thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky, John Dewey, Howard Gardner, and Alan Turing. These Celebrities and the others listed in the site cover specific topics as diverse as linguistics, decision making, and human intelligence. The site also contains articles on topic such as: What Is Cognitive Science?
After sampling the entries in this site consider whether the topics and research findings apply across cultures. Does Herbert Simon's concept of "bounded rationality" apply only to American managers or to managers in every culture? Does Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory explain Israeli children's intellectual abilities as well as those of children in Brazil and Sri Lanka?
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