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THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT
HOW ASIANS AND WESTERNERS THINK DIFFERENTLY - AND WHY
Richard E Nisbett
"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
Everyone knows that whatever their skin colour, 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 true 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 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.
A landmark book based on groundbreaking international research, it raises questions such as:
- Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry, the brilliant achievement of Greeks like 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?
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 which date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world.
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 time 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.
"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
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.