Becoming a holistic thinker: training effect of oriental medicine on reasoning

The authors hypothesized that training in Oriental medicine would make students think in a more holistic way. Study 1 found that students of Oriental medicine exhibited a cyclic expectation of future change, a key characteristic of holistic thinking, more than did students in other majors, such that the former, not the latter, believed that if something was going up or going down, it would reverse its direction in the future. Study 2 found that students in Oriental medicine also possessed a more complex causal belief and hence considered a greater amount of information in causal attribution than did students in other majors. More important, such a complex causal belief increased with the length of training in Oriental medicine. Implications and future research are discussed.