The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and WhyA “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. |
Other editions - View all
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - and Why Richard E. Nisbett No preview available - 2019 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract American participants ancient Chinese ancient Greek animals Ara Norenzayan argument Asian Americans Asians today asked assumption attributes behave behavior believe causal China Chinese and American colleagues complex Confucian context contradiction culture debate Developmental psychologists dialectical East Asians ence environment enzyme Q erners European Americans example fact field dependent formal logic Fundamental Attribution Error Gang Lu goals Greece Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars holistic Hong Kong important Incheol Choi independent individual Indo-European languages infer interdependent Japan Japanese Kaiping Peng Kitayama Koreans Koreans and Americans language less Li-jun Ji live Markus Mohists nature nese Nisbett nouns objects pants percent person plausible political preference principle propositions question reasoning relations relationships reported rhetoric rules scientists sense showed Social psychologists societies Taoist target tend tested things thought tion tradition ulnar arteries understand University values verbs West whereas