"Do culture and individual beliefs affect logical thinking? If so,how do they influence the conclusions we reach?

KNOWLEDGE, our most precious asset, is the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning. Knowledge in short is knowledge about reality; its base is perception and method reason. Hence, reason plays a key role being the method. It is an analytic tool for understanding what we perceive and thus contributing to our knowledge. The issue of correct and coherent reasoning is important because it is a way of finding the truth. Reasoning in true sense is guided on the basis of logic. Logic in fact is a system of reasoning. In order to reason out about things, we apply logical thinking to it. Logic is defined as a way of thinking or explaining something on the terms of validity. Logic therefore deals with only the validity of reason and not the truth. It provides the anatomy (analysis) of thought. However, the reasoning of thought is more affected by emotions which are strongly governed by culture and individual beliefs. As defined by Albert Hubbard,

Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

Hence, from this it follows that logical thinking affected by a person's beliefs and culture.

Culture has the greatest influence on an individual's thinking. The cause for this is it is inherited by an individual from his surroundings and nurturing he received from his childhood. No matter what he does his culture will always be reflected in his ways of doing things and thinking. For e.g., if the background an individual is brought up strongly believes in religion, the individual will grow up having strong faith in God. They would relate most of the things in their lives to God.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

A few years back in India, on a God's feast day a very strange thing happened. A devotee while