Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why. New York: The Free Press, 2003.

• Background: Richard Nisbett is a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. "I had been a lifelong universalist concerning the nature of human thought." [p.xiii]
  
  
• People can learn to think differently. In his experimental work, Nisbett was surprised to discover that not all people reason the same way. "I found substantial training effects. For example, people who have taken a few statistics courses avoid lots of errors in daily life ... Economists, it turns out, think differently about all sorts of things than the rest of us do -- from deciding whether to remain at a boring movie to reasoning about foreign policy." [p.xv]
  
  
• East versus West. In this book, Nisbett draws on his own research, and the research of others concerning the differences between "Asians" and "Westerners."
  
  
• Nisbett identifies five major areas of difference:
  
  
  1. Separation from the Natural World. Westerners are more likely to view themselves as separate from the Natural world. "The Greeks defined nature as the universe minus human beings and their culture." [p.20] "Evolution was never controversial in the East because there was never an assumption that humans sat atop a chain of being and somehow had lost their animality." [p.154]
     
     
  2. Objects versus Relationships. Western infants learn nouns at a faster rate than verbs. This is not the case for Asians (Gentner). "Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a "subject-prominent" langauge. There must be a subject even in the sentence "It is raining." Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast are "topic-prominent" langauges." [p.157] "[A]fter viewing underwater scenes, Americans start with describing an object "There was a big fish, maybe a trout, moving off to the left") whereas Japanese start by establishing the context ("It looked like a pond")." [pp.157-158]
     
     
  3. Interdependence versus Independence. Westerners place a premium on independence. (Western infants tend to sleep in a separate crib, while Asian infants tend to sleep with the parents.) "The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony. Every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives -- the clan, the village, and especially the family." [p.5] Self-control is more important than the control of nature. "Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems." [p.55]
     
     
  4. Complexity versus Simplicity. "The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners" [p.xvi]
     
     An illustrative story: "There is an ancient Chinese story, still known to most East Asians today, about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. Knowing that the horse was the mainstay of his livelihood, his neighbors came to commiserate with him. "Who knows what's bad or good?" said the old man, refusing their sympathy. And indeed, a few days later his horse returned, brining with it a wild horse. The old man's friends came to congratulate him. Rejecting their congratulations, the old man said, "Who knows what's bad or good?" And, as it happened, a few days later when the old man's son was attempting to ride the wild horse, he was thrown from it and his leg was broken. The friends came to express their sadness about the son's misfortune. "Who knows what's bad or good?" said the old man. A few weeks passed, and the army came to the village to conscript all the able-bodied men to fight a war against the neighboring province, but the old man's son was not fit to serve and was spared. [pp.12-13]
     
     
  5. Logic versus Reasonableness. "The principle of noncontradiction lies at the base of [Western] propositional logic." [p.25] [Eastern cultures] "strive to be reasonable, not rational." [p.26] Instead of "avoid contradictions," Eastern cultures "avoid extremes." "To set aside universal rules in order to accommodate particular cases seems immoral to the Westerner. To insist on the same rules for every case can seem at best obtuse and rigid to the Easterner and at worst cruel." [pp.64-65]
     
     
• Nisbett's main conclusion is that psychology does not precede society. "My claim is not that the cognitive differences we find in the laboratory cause the differences in attitudes, values, and behaviors, but that the cognitive differences are inseparable from the social and motivational ones. People hold the beliefs they do because of the way they think and they think the way they do because of the nature of the societies they live in." [p.201]
  
  

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