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The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why Paperback – April 5, 2004

by Richard E. Nisbett (Author)

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A “landmark book” (Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association) by one of the world's preeminent psychologists that proves human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture.

Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong?

The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that 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. 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 contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.

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 will span it.

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Editorial Reviews

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Providence Journal-Bulletin
Understanding the thought processes of other cultures may very well turn out to be critical to the survival of Western civilization....The Geography of Thought is a wake-up call.

Publishers Weekly
The Geography of Thought may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars.

Philadelphia Inquirer
Nisbett's findings pose provocative challenges to universalist assumptions about human thought and inference.

About the Author

Richard E. Nisbett, PhD, has taught psychology at Yale and currently teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society, and, in 2002, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is the author and editor of several university press titles. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Product details

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Free Press; Reprint edition (April 5, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743255356
ISBN-13: 978-0743255356
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 129 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #49 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Evolutionary Psychology
- #180 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > Ethnic Studies
- #325 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Cognitive

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Leib Gershon Mitchell

So what?

September 21, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The first question I have is: how does the author know any of this?

Does he speak Chinese? Did he live there?

The second question is with his competence in the subject of study. (Let's remember that he is a social psychologist, and not a historian.) One glaring error is that he leaves out Legalism entirely. Legalism has a very long history in China, and almost as long as that of Confucianism. How he missed that is beyond me.

The third question is with the intellectual Foundation of treating civilizations that were in Chinese orbit as offshoots of China.

Japan took a lot of ideas from China, but they also had no problem with adapting to different ways. (Korea is a similar example that happened much later).

Vietnam was a Chinese Colony for a thousand years, but they aren't quite the same thing as China nor the same thing as Japan and Korea.

I wonder if a better way to take this could have been to describe the thought process in terms of geographic factors, (a la "Guns, Gems, and Steel" by Jared Diamond). To wit: China was a huge, self contained hegemon and it was fairly homogeneous, and so there was no conflict of ideas because no one would ever meet someone with different ideas. And therefore no reason to develop these thought processes.

Japan and Korea were both smaller places, and so they had to develop the techniques of dealing with new ideas.

Greece was composed of a number of small city-states, and so is there any mystery that they were used to working with and evaluating new ideas?

Even then, to treat it in that way would need some qualifications. People in coastal places like Guangdong and Fujian have been merchants and seafaring people from hundreds of years, and some new ideas are something to which they have become accustomed.

I also have questions with this type of reasoning in general. If you have an idea of the principles of Darwinian evolution (such as it is), it doesn't mean that you can go forward and predict the existence of when antibiotic resistance will occur or what new species will exist thousands of years before the event.

And if you can go backwards and create ex post facto explanations, then so what?

And then the explanations that a person wants depends on which questions they ask. (I lived in China for many years. 11, by my count.) And I noticed that Chinese people had the most difficult time using processes that had already been developed.

So, there would be an International Baccalaureate curriculum that was already developed, but they could not maintain the program because they just could not follow the instructions in the way that they were detailed.

If that happens to have been my slice of reality, what I have predicted it from this book? Or, is it just a trivial empirical observation about something that I should take as read for future reference?

There's also discussion of a number of "big picture" theories. Marxism. Sociology. These theories are huge, broad and expansive, but they are extremely useless for limited, specific, REAL LIFE predictions.

So, it happens that Continental Europeans make bigger theories. So now what?

It feels like this author is trying to develop the intellectual Foundation to explain something whose existence he could never have predicted anyway.

And so the (fourth) question comes again..... "So what?"

If your time to read books is limited, I recommend that you give this one a miss. And read the Jared Diamond book in preference to it.

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Dennis E. Bradford

Two Fundamentally Different Approaches Explained Clearly

August 29, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Realizing that there are two different ways to describe the world (namely, focusing on objects or focusing on relations) is very beneficial. Why? Once we realize that there is a wholly different approach to the world, we are more able to detach from our habitual conceptual frameworks. That obviously fosters interpersonal communication and reduces fanaticism. Those in turn foster living together more harmoniously. This book is very readable. It's by a psychologist and cites easily understood studies. (By way of contrast, philosophers [like me!] who treat the same topic can be much more difficult to understand.) Especially if you are unfamiliar with the fundamental dichotomy discussed, I recommend this book.

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Michael

Are you western or of eastern culture? Read this and develop an understanding of why the other person acts and thinks different.

April 5, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

For those who would like to have a solid knowledge and grasp of the root causes of cultural differences - this is the best book I've come across.

3 people found this helpful

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Carolyn Bloomer

A good read for general audiences and undergraduate students

August 10, 2006

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The field of psychology has long been dominated by a `universalist' position in which the results of experiments (often using American college students as subjects) have been generalized to the whole of humankind, and the complicating role of culture conveniently ignored. Therefore, as a cultural anthropologist, China specialist, and writer on cross-cultural aspects of visual perception, I was especially interested in this persuasive book by a leading social psychologist who has recently abandoned the universalist view.

Nisbett is at his best when he uses the results of various research studies as a platform for generalizing about differences between East and West. For those of us who work in related fields (anthropology, philosophy, international relations, international business, etc.), Nisbett's conclusions are neither new nor surprising. What makes his book worth reading is the way in which he effectively brings evidence from the field of social psychology into the discourse about East-West differences.

Chapters address cultural differences related to the construction of psycho-social self, styles of argumentation and negotiation, perceptions of parts vs. wholes, attributions of causality, relations between language and thought, models of logic and inference, and so on. Nisbett is at his weakest when opining about ancient `social origins of mind' where he conveniently glosses over the complexities of history. This chapter could (and perhaps should) have been omitted without affecting the overall integrity of the book.

The Geography of Thought is most useful for a general audience or for undergraduate students in comparative cultural studies. It's easy to read; it's clearly written; it presents the reader with a level of analysis and understanding that is more substantial than ordinary generalizations and stereotypes; and it does not overly burden the reader with technical details about the research.

Scholars, on the other hand, are apt to find points of irritation. The end-notes, for example, consist merely of citations, whereas the author easily could have (and to my mind should have) used this venue to provide a finer grain of detail about the studies to which he refers. Also problematic are the occasional lapses into describing Asian thought systems in terms of "absence", "lack", and "failure to develop", which reinforces an `orientalist' perspective of the cultural other as a negative mirror of ourselves. Nisbett's limited comprehension of the dynamics of Chinese linguistic meaning construction prompts him to misleading assertions at a low level of analysis (e.g., that "there is no word for `size' " and "no suffix equivalent to `ness' in Chinese", p. 17-18). China scholars will also be annoyed by the unacknowledged inconsistency of Romanization systems (sometimes Wade-Giles, sometimes Pinyin) and his references (pp. 71, 121) to the early `80s as "toward the end of the Cultural Revolution" (which actually ended in 1976). Such flaws should have been identified and corrected through broader peer reviews and informed editing.

28 people found this helpful

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Thought provoking

August 4, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Does a good job of describing the major differences between the East and the West. Interesting studies are discussed.

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