Product Description

When Richard 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. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - 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 categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60889 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"This book may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars. Nisbett, an eminent psychologist and co-author of a seminal Psychological Review paper on how people talk about their decision making, reports on some of his latest work in cultural psychology. He contends that "human cognition is not everywhere the same"-that those brought up in Western and East Asian cultures think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. Such a contention pits his work squarely against evolutionary psychology (as articulated by Steven Pinker and others) and cognitive science, which assume all appreciable human characteristics are "hard wired." Initial chapters lay out the traditional differences between Aristotle and Confucius, and the social practices that produced (and have grown out of) these differing "homeostatic approaches" to the world: Westerners tend to inculcate individualism and choice (40 breakfast cereals at the supermarket), while East Asians are oriented toward group relations and obligations ("the tall poppy is cut down" remains a popular Chinese aphorism). Next, Nisbett presents his actual experiments and data, many of which measure reaction times in recalling previously shown objects. They seem to show East Asians (a term Nisbett uses as a catch-all for Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and others) measurably more holistic in their perceptions (taking in whole scenes rather than a few stand-out objects). Westerners, or those brought up in Northern European and Anglo-Saxon-descended cultures, have a "tunnel-vision perceptual style" that focuses much more on identifying what's prominent in certain scenes and remembering it. Writing dispassionately yet with engagement, Nisbett explains the differences as "an inevitable consequence of using different tools to understand the world." If his explanation turns out to be generally accepted, it means a big victory for memes in their struggle with genes."Publishers Weekly; "Cultural psychology has come of age and Richard Nisbett's book will surely become one of the canonical texts of this provocative discipline. The Geography of Thought challenges a fundamental premise of the Western Enlightenment - the idea that modes of thought are, ought to be, or will become the same wherever you go - East or West, North or South - in the world." Richard A. Shweder, anthropologist and William Claude Reavis Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago; "I have long been following Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking work on culture and cognition. After so many fascinating experiments, challenging hypotheses, and passionate debates, it was a great time for Nisbett to share his ideas and findings with a wider public. The Geography of Thought does superbly!" Dan Sperber, author of Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach; "An important, research-based challenge to the assumption widespread among cognitive scientists that thinking the world over is fundamentally the same." Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of Frames of Mind: Theories of Multiple Intelligences; "This is another landmark book by University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett. Nisbett shows conclusively that laboratory experiments limited to American college students or even individuals from the western hemisphere simply cannot provide an adequate understanding of how people, in general, think. The book shows that understanding of how individuals in eastern cultures think is not just nice, but necessary, if we wish to solve the problems we confront in the world today. We ignore the lessons of this book at our peril." Robert J. Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education; Director, Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise (PACE Center), Yale University; President-Elect, American Psychological Association; "The cultural differences in cognition, demonstrated in this ground-breaking work, are far more profound and wide-ranging than anybody in the field could have possibly imagined just a decade ago. The findings are surprising for universalists; remarkable for culturalists; and regardless, they are most thought-provoking for all students of human cognition." Shinobu Kitayama, Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Kyoto University

From the Inside Flap
"This book may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars. Nisbett, an eminent psychologist and co-author of a seminal Psychological Review paper on how people talk about their decision making, reports on some of his latest work in cultural psychology. He contends that "[h]uman cognition is not everywhere the same"-that those brought up in Western and East Asian cultures think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. Such a contention pits his work squarely against evolutionary psychology (as articulated by Steven Pinker and others) and cognitive science, which assume all appreciable human characteristics are "hard wired." Initial chapters lay out the traditional differences between Aristotle and Confucius, and the social practices that produced (and have grown out of) these differing "homeostatic approaches" to the world: Westerners tend to inculcate individualism and choice (40 breakfast cereals at the supermarket), while East !
Asians are oriented toward group relations and obligations ("the tall poppy is cut down" remains a popular Chinese aphorism). Next, Nisbett presents his actual experiments and data, many of which measure reaction times in recalling previously shown objects. They seem to show East Asians (a term Nisbett uses as a catch-all for Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and others) measurably more holistic in their perceptions (taking in whole scenes rather than a few stand-out objects). Westerners, or those brought up in Northern European and Anglo-Saxon-descended cultures, have a "tunnel-vision perceptual style" that focuses much more on identifying what's prominent in certain scenes and remembering it. Writing dispassionately yet with engagement, Nisbett explains the differences as "an inevitable consequence of using different tools to understand the world." If his explanation turns out to be generally accepted, it means a big victory for memes in their struggle with genes."
Publishers Weekly
"Cultural psychology has come of age and Richard Nisbett's book will surely become one of the canonical texts of this provocative discipline. The Geography of Thought challenges a fundamental premise of the Western Enlightenment - the idea that modes of thought are, ought to be, or will become the same wherever you go - East or West, North or South - in the world."
Richard A. Shweder, anthropologist and William Claude Reavis Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago
"I have long been following Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking work on culture and cognition. After so many fascinating experiments, challenging hypotheses, and passionate debates, it was a great time for Nisbett to share his ideas and findings with a wider public. The Geography of Thought does superbly!"
Dan Sperber, author of Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach
"An important, research-based challenge to the assumption widespread among cognitive scientists that thinking the world over is fundamentally the same."
Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of Frames of Mind: Theories of Multiple Intelligences
"This is another landmark book by University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett. Nisbett shows conclusively that laboratory experiments limited to American college students or even individuals from the western hemisphere simply cannot provide an adequate understanding of how people, in general, think. The book shows that understanding of how individuals in eastern cultures think is not just nice, but necessary, if we wish to solve the problems we confront in the world today. We ignore the lessons of this book at our peril."
Robert J. Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education; Director, Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise (PACE Center), Yale University;
President-Elect, American Psychological Association
"The cultural differences in cognition, demonstrated in this ground-breaking work, are far more profound and wide-ranging than anybody in the field could have possibly imagined just a decade ago. The findings are surprising for universalists; remarkable for culturalists; and regardless, they are most thought-provoking for all students of human cognition."

Shinobu Kitayama, Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Kyoto University

About the Author
Richard E. Nisbett, Ph.D., has taught psychology at Yale University and the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2002 became the first social psychologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences in a generation. The co-author of Culture of Honor and numerous other books and articles, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Customer Reviews

R.I.P. - The Blank Slate?
Not long ago, the idea that babies are born "mentally malleable" was thought to have been laid to rest. Richard Nisbett has granted the idea a conditional resurrection with this book. Instead of culture being but a gloss over what evolution granted our cognitive skills, it is the foundation on which thinking rests. In a significant study of East-West cultural differences, he finds a deep cleavage between them. Easterners, he argues, show a marked propensity for an holistic outlook - seeing environments before details and fitting individuals within a group. Westerners, with an interest in the more specific, elevate the individual and focus on details over context. Although these differences are exemplified by Confucius' teachings in the East and Aristotle in the West, they are by no means the founders of the attitudes. Indeed, according to Nisbett, the roots of this dichotomy reach deeply into the past.

Western notions, he argues, derive from a Greek ideal of "personal agency". The individual might live in city or farm, but his actions and voice were unique. They also originated the investigation of nature's workings - a process that would culminate in today's usurpation of the environment. Individuals contested their ideas publicly, a process reflected in such diverse environments as politics and science. Ideas are "testable" for validity and utility.

In the East, particularly in Confucian China, the underlying theme is "harmony". For the individual, that's reflected in submergence within the group, whether family or corporation. Disputes aren't resolved by debate, but by mediation, often by a third party. Where Americans, Nesbitt says, use confrontation, even litigation, to resolve issues, the East finds a Middle Way. He finds graphic expression of this in the fact that there are forty times more lawyers per capita in the United States than in Japan!

Nesbitt bases his contentions on several years of study of both cultural areas. He incorporates the work of other researchers [although no cognitive scientists are cited] who have investigated both cultures. The studies have consistently demonstrated how Eastern and Western cultures view themselves, other cultures and education. The last is of some significance as many students from Eastern societies have been educated in Western nations. What impact, he asks, is this type of exchange likely to have on cultural diversity.

Nesbitt's study concludes with the two modern expressions of the future of cultural diversity. Almost no other modern works on the future of humanity could be as diametrically opposed as Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis and Huntington's "clash of civilisations". Francis Fukuyama's proposal that "democratic capitalism" will expand without limit, bringing the world under the hegemony of the "free market", and by default, making humanity "american" in thought and practice, has been challenged by many. The greatest of these challengers is Samuel Huntington, who contends that the peoples not immediately benefitting from the "free market's" blessings will resist its encroachments, even by force when all else fails. Nesbitt, a consummate optimist, thinks that the increasing mobility of the world's populace will turn this dialectic into a synthesis of merged outlooks.
How likely this Middle Way of Nesbitt's is to be achieved is moot. Recent activities in the Near East by Western powers suggest this book needs wider exposure. How deeply these traits are ingrained in the cognitive makeup of two major human populations is also moot. His own research, which prompts his own Middle Way, is shown by the reactions of Easterners and Westerners spending time in each other's environment - especially in school. But no more than the first steps have been taken. It requires both societies to recognise the differences before the mediation can be accomplished. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Guide for understanding East Asia and Western differences.
Are there basic differences in thought processes between the Chinese-Confucian societies of East Asia and Western societies? The author answers "yes" and makes a compelling case.

Nisbett's thesis is that there is no universal human cognition - all cognition is culturally affected. Through the use of numerous psychological studies he shows a stark difference in the way Westerners and East Asians perceive, reason, and "see" the world. Nisbett begins by tracing the origins of Western and East Asian philosophy, science and society. On this foundation he builds a case that Western and East Asian cognition is very different. He completes the book with two chapters on the implications of such differences to our modern world.

After 15 years living and working in 3 countries in Asia I can say that there are fundamental differences in the way people from different cultures process, evaluate, and act on information. Everyone views the world through cultural "glasses," and the glasses are all different. Being aware of your own glasses and the glasses of others is a beginning to cross-cultural understanding.

My Japanese colleague has stopped trying to explain to Americans the way Japanese people think - now he just lets Nisbett's book do it. This book provides important research foundations for trainers and coaches who work cross-culturally in Asia.

Eastern and western ways of thinking compared
Nesbitt explores how and why East Asians and Westerners think differently. He shows how context influences our way of thinking and behaving. Certainly of interest for social psychology students. But it's interesting for everybody else who wonders, why people sometimes don't understand each other. It certainly opened up new horizons for me and was a source of greater understanding. A bonus is also, that it is not at all written in a dry, scientific style but very readable. Brilliant.