The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why (Paperback)

Nisbett -- somewhat typically of Western authors, be it said -- credits the ancient Greeks with such virtues as a recognition of the uniqueness of the individual, a sense of curiosity, a desire to plumb the underlying reasons and principles of things, and so on, all qualities which he claims are absent or largely absent in China (if not indeed everywhere else in the past). I really don't think these claims stand up to the facts at all. (Don't know if I'm being paranoid, but frankly I seem to pick up faint racist odors coming from this book. And I really do think Nisbett is selecting from the facts.)

A reading of the Analects shows that Confucius was highly sensitive to the differences in personality among his students and tailored his teachings to suit them accordingly. He also demanded a lot of independent thinking from them and got upset when all they did was parrot his words. Contrariwise, scholars like Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Snell have argued that the 'heroes' of Homer's ILIAD cannot be understood as integrated individuals, only as 'systems of loosely connected parts'. Also, the Greeks practised slavery, but the Chinese mostly didn't, according to sinologists Joseph Needham and Derk Bodde. So much for the claim that the Greeks valued the individual and the Chinese didn't.

Nisbett also claims that there was little debate and argumentation between different views in the Chinese tradition. But there have been disagreements aplenty in the history of Chinese thought. Letters of discussion went back and forth between the Sung Dynasty thinkers Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan. Maurizio Scarpari also spoke of 'a lively and productive debate' on human nature in China 'that has almost lasted twenty-five centuries'.

Chu Hsi, China's most influential thinker for seven centuries, also advocated 'the investigation of things' to uncover their LI (often translated as 'principle') -- what makes them what they are. Who says the Greeks were the only people to search for principles and to be curious to know, and not the Chinese? Not surprisingly, there is no reference to Chu Hsi in Nisbett's book.

Finally, I want to look at what Nisbett said about the ancient remains of a group of people found somewhere in China, being identified as being of Caucasian stock and showing signs of being operated on surgically. Alongside this he muses on the absence of the practice of surgery in the Chinese tradition. What's the intended point? That if those were the remains of Asians, then marks of surgical operation would have been impossible? Apparently Nisbett didn't know that the world's first book on forensic medicine was Chinese. And surely it is a very long way from the unusual features found on a few corpses to sweeping generalisations about differences between races and cultures.

All in all, the book is interesting, but it makes certain claims that warrant a little suspicion.

A typical experiment puts Easterners and Westerners in some
situation, and notes that they behave differently. For example,
Westerners describe the fish they saw, while Easterners first describe
the pond. But given two piles of descriptions, it's typically fairly
easy to find SOME differentiators between them. Instead, this should
have been done in a double-blind fashion: given just the descriptions,
with what certainty could the authors' ancestry have been predicted?

Similarly, the rationalizations given for the results of the
experiments seem rather post hoc. For example, experimental subjects
were given an essay on a controversial topic, told that the writer had
been forced to support a particular view-point in the essay, and asked
what the writer's true view-point might have been. The "correct"
answer is that there need not be any link between the "forced"
view-point in the essay and the writer's true view-point. Would the
"rationalistic" Westerners or the "holistic" Easterners be better at
figuring this out? In fact, the Easterners were better, and this is
attributed to their understanding of the "whole situation." On the
other hand, if the Westerners had been better, could not that have
been equally easily attributed to their superior reasoning skills?

The differences between Easterners and Westerners is attributed to
two millenia of cultural differences. However, the book also says
that people can be trained to switch viewpoints by a few hours of
training. So the differences can't be that innate in people, even
after two millenia! For example, a Western researcher had worked in
Japan for a few years. Upon wanting to return to Canada, he prefaced
his letters of application for university jobs in Canada by
apologizing for his being unqualified for those jobs! Apparently,
that's a standard practice for such letters in Japan. So this seems
very much a learned cultural adaptation, and does not contradict the
theses by Pinker et. al. that important human characteristics are
"hard-wired" (as described in the editorial review).

When do Easterners switch to Western practices, or vice versa?
For example, Westerners apparently go to court looking for justice,
whereas Easterners seek hostility reduction. When would it take for
an Easterner to abandon hostility reduction and seek justice? "Yes,
he burned down my house, [took] my wife, and kicked my dog, but I just
want us to get along better."

The author also carefully avoids discussing in any meaningful
fashion whether Eastern or Western practice is objectively better.
For example, among just the Easterners, is there any correlation

between an individual's level of success (measured by income,
happiness, status, and/or other such measures) and how Eastern or
Western their thought processes are?

Western thought is characterized as focusing on attributes of
objects, while Eastern thought focuses on the continuous substances
that constitute those objects. I'm not sure how literally the author
means this to be believed, but surely Western thought is superior in
this case, because objects are NOT made of continuous substances.
This was established long ago by showing that when different liquids
are mixed, the total volume often decreases, strongly suggesting that
the liquids are composed of differently-sized particles (think gravel
and sand), rather than being continuous substances.

While reading this book, I felt that the author was very careful
to avoid any experiments or analysis that might undermine cultural
relativism. This gave the book a sour taste, in spite of how

interesting the experiments were.

Full disclosure: I've lived 57% of my life in Sri Lanka (near
India), 9% in Britain, and 34% in U.S.A., in that order. - Rujith.

Now, for the bad. If Nisbett had stuck to his interesting and fascinating experiments on human subjects, this book might have made for some interesting reading. Instead, his aims are much larger. He wants to show that, "Each of these orientations -- the Western and the Eastern -- is a self-reinforcing, homeostatic system. The social practices promote the worldviews: the worldviews dictate the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both justify the world views and support the social practices. Understanding these homeostatic systems has implications for grasping the fundamental nature of the mind, for beliefs about how we ought ideally to reason, and for appropriate education strategies for different peoples." There is so much philosophical absurdity packed into this phrase it's hard to unpack it all, but it spills out all over the book making it disconnected and confused at times. What would it mean to understand how we "ideally ought to reason." If we "ideally" knew how to reason we could shut off all debate. Where is Karl Popper when you need him? Think about it. If there is an ideal way to reason, then all future debate is shut off immediately. There's no reason to argue or debate about anything, merely turn the levers and use the "ideal" reasoning principles. Where's Kurt Godel when you need him? Another thing Nisbett might want to ask himself is this, how does he escape his own homeostatic system? After all, if the system determined his beliefs about the system then how do we know they are true at all, and not just products of the system itself?

Given this fundamentally flawed thesis, and his attempt to take some very narrow experiments on human subjects and basically roam sloppily over virtually any area he chooses, ranging from philosophy to history to culture, we get a phantasmagoria of stereotypes and confusions. Nisbett's biases are clear, he favors the Western system, after all, the entire approach of the book is mostly logical and argumentative. Yet, Nisbett wants to alternate between putting on his homeostatic-system-hat-for-Asians and his homeostatic-system-hat-for-Westerners as he compares the two with complete relativistic glee. He states: "Medicine in the West retains the analytic, object-oriented, and interventionist approaches that were common thousands of years ago: Find the offending part or humour and remove or alter it. Medicine in the East is far more holistic and has never until modern times been in the least inclined towards surgery or other heroic interventions." What's he got against Western medicine? He thinks that removing the offending humour is the same as modern surgery? He claims he isn't a relativist, and that's right. He's just confused.

There's a lot going on in Japan, where I live, worthy of interest and study. There is a serious problem, though, with critical thinking in Japan. After all, there is a lot of authoritarianism in Japan, just as there is throughout Asia. People in Japan need to learn to express their opinion and they aren't learning how to do that enough. (For that matter they could do a better job in America as well!). The former Japanese ambassador to the UN Yoshio Hatano once said, "Study should not be memorizing what our teachers teach us but learning how to think on our own. And what many Japanese need is to be able to clearly express and advocate their own opinions, even if these might be "minority opinions."" He said this in reference to the fact that many Japanese can't argue their opinions. Nisbet reduces issues like this to : "Is it a form of "colonialism" to demand that they [Asians] perform verbally and share their thoughts with their classmates?" Give me a break! With Nisbett's confused homeostatic-system-causes-beliefs model he just muddles his way through a host of important ethical issues spreading more confusion than enlightenment.

All in all, I would say Nisbett's problem is too much looking for ideal methods of reasoning and too little Karl Popper. In _Objective Knowledge_ Popper states, "An observation always presupposes the existence of some system of expectations." Basically Nisbett's whole program revolves around giving Asians and Westerners vague commands like "observe" or "choose" and then seeing how their expectations or preconceptions influenced them. This is interesting, but it doesn't tell us much we didn't already know. People from different cultures have different preconceptions. According to Popper we all have preconceptions and it's trying to improve them and get a little closer to the truth that is important. Is this a Western approach? Is this an Eastern approach? Is that all that matters?

I do recommend people interested in Asia check out some of these experiments on human subjects, they are interesting and worth reading about. Nevertheless, I can hardly recommend this book in clean and clear conscience. It's just too ugly.