People from Western and East Asian cultures exhibit systematic differences in perception, attention, and cognition. This dissertation investigates the origins of cultural differences between Western and East Asian groups, and the cognitive consequences of these differences for American and Chinese people. First, I evaluate one prominent proposal that claims the psychological differences between Westerners and East Asians mirror and derive, in part, from differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophies. I present a review of these ancient philosophical traditions and argue that they have been mischaracterized. I then present several potential mechanisms by which modern mindsets may have given rise to the misinterpretations present in the modern literature. In the following parts of this dissertation, I present empirical work delving into the consequences that cultural differences have for high-level cognition, specifically abstract thought. An influential perspective in the social sciences claims that greater sensitivity to context should impede abstract thinking in people from non-Western cultures, specifically people from China, relative to people from Western cultures. I report the results of several studies testing this proposal. These studies consistently find Chinese participants to be more abstract thinkers than US participants, as indexed by validated measures of two types of abstract thought: event cognition and analogical reasoning. These findings challenge the view that Westerners think more abstractly than Chinese people. These results suggest that, rather than being an impediment, context-sensitivity may foster abstract thought.