Do Experiences Studying Abroad Promote Dialectical Thinking?

摘要: Our current work seeks to provide direct evidence on whether Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote dialectical thinking. We collected behavioral data from 258 Chinese international students studying in multiple regions. We found that when primed with studying abroad (relative to traveling abroad, their hometown culture and a control condition), participants were more likely to show tolerance for contradiction, meaning that they deemed both sides of contradictory scientific statements as convincing and rated them more favorably. Therefore, it is plausible that Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote their dialectical thinking regardless of their host culture. More work is needed to further this line of research by 1) extending these effects with other measures of dialectical thinking, 2) adopting differing paradigms to provide more robust findings, and 3) understanding how experiences studying abroad may promote dialectical thinking.