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Does talking actually help you think? In many classrooms, we assume it does. Students are encouraged to speak up, participate, explain their reasoning, and “think out loud.” But psychologist Heejung Kim wondered whether that relationship between talking and thinking might be culturally shaped. In a classic 2002 study, she had European American and East Asian American students solve difficult reasoning problems either silently or while explaining their thoughts out loud. For the European American participants, thinking aloud didn’t significantly hurt performance. For the East Asian American participants, it did. When solving silently, they averaged about 12.35 correct answers. When required to think aloud, that dropped to 9.24. Kim then tested something especially interesting: inner speech. Participants solved problems while repeatedly saying the alphabet out loud, making it harder to use an internal verbal monologue at the same time. This interfered more with European American participants’ performance than with East Asian American participants’ performance. Kim argued that culture may shape not only how comfortable we are expressing our thoughts, but aspects of how we actually process information. Some people may rely more heavily on verbalizing during thought, while others may rely less on inner speech. That has an important implication for classrooms and workplaces. Silence doesn’t automatically mean someone is confused, disengaged, unprepared, or lacking ideas. And speaking frequently doesn’t automatically mean someone understands more. Of course, these were average differences between groups in specific experiments—not rules about how every Asian American or European American thinks. People within any cultural group vary enormously. But the study raises an important question: When we reward people for “speaking up,” are we measuring the quality of their thinking—or how closely their thinking style matches our expectations? Do you think better by talking things through or sitting quietly first? #psychologyfacts #asian #communicationskills #participation #cultural