Grounded Models for Understanding Conflicts from Multiple Points of View Course VI Advanced Project

Understanding the effect of culture on how people think is important to begin to understand human cognition. Cultural misunderstandings can be attributed to differences in cultural experiences, instead of differences in cognitive mechanisms. If we are to understand how people think, we need to create models that show us how cultural experiences forge different points of view. In this project, I study the effect of Eastern and Western cultures on reasoning by precedents. I use the analogical mapper of the Bridge Project to determine structural similarities between matched stories to simulate the process of reasoning about a current event against already-established precedents. Using eleven soccer article stories from Eastern culture publications and ten soccer article stories from Western culture publications, the analogical mapper matches stories against each other and assigns match scores for each story pair. After hypothesizing that scores for Eastern against Western stories are lower than scores for Eastern or Western stories matched against themselves, the results of this experiment show that the differences in the scores are statistically insignificant, with a p-value of 1. I propose areas of the experiment that could be improved upon to obtain more significant results.