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Search - The Geography of Thought : How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

The Geography of Thought How Asians and Westerners Think Differentlyand Why
Author: Richard Nisbett

Everyone knows that while different cultures may think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. Everyone knows that whatever the skin color, nationality, or religion, every human being uses the same tools for perception, for memory, and for reasoning. Everyone knows that a logically true statement is tru... more »e in English, German, or Hindi. Everyone knows that when a Chinese and an American look at the same painting, they see the same painting.But what if everyone is wrong?When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment -- and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. For, as Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought, people actually think about -- and even see -- the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" -- drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to catergories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior. The Geography of Thought documents Professor Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology, a series of comparative studies both persuasive in their rigor and startling in their conclusions, addressing questions such as:• Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry, the brilliant achievement of such Greeks as Euclid?• Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings?• Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the other way around in East Asia?• What are the implications of these cognitive differences for the future of international politics? Do they support a Fukuyamaesque "end of history" scenario or a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations"?From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that might be able to span it.

ISBN-13: 9780743216463
ISBN-10: 0743216466
Publication Date: 3/3/2003
Pages: 288
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Free Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

Gabriel V. reviewed The Geography of Thought : How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why on 12/23/2005 + 17 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

interesting and insightful

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Jessica Q. reviewed The Geography of Thought : How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why on 3/4/2012

Helpful Score: 1

Very interesting hypotheses and summary of relevant data describing how and why Asians and Westerners, or rather those from interconnected and those of independent societies, think differently. If read with an open mind, it forces one to reevaluate cognitive assumptions of which one may have been previously unaware. The text also helps to puts into perspective a lot of societal ills that may result from cognitive errors.

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