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

by Richard E. Nisbett

It is Westerners, and Americans in particular, who pioneered the atomistic, interchangeable, uniform, modular approach to manufacturing and merchandising.

“Chinese are too rational to separate form from content.”

The joy lies in modeling for its own sake, not in making sense of behavior.

Western debate style, and the mental habits it encourages, are important for keeping societies open and open-minded.

Debate is an important educational tool for learning analytic thinking skills and for forcing self-conscious reflection on the validity of one’s ideas.

Analytic thought, which dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways, lends itself to being captured in language. Holistic thought, which responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and which makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, is less well suited to linguistic representation.

Two advantages of Asian cognition stand out: (1) the fact that Asians see more of a given scene or context than Westerners do; and (2) the holistic, dialectic, Middle Way approach to problems.

cultural biases can creep into language-based intelligence tests. Even within a given culture, people of different socioeconomic status have different exposure to words, and certainly across cultures and across languages, comparisons become almost meaningless.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false, it is immoral, and it is dangerous.”

value checklists, and even attitude scales, are not very good ways of getting at values.

In Huntington’s opinion, the assumption that the world’s cultures will be assimilated to those of the West is an illusion bred of myopia and ethnocentrism. The societal differences are sufficiently great that future international conflicts will be more nearly cultural in origin than economic or political as in the past.

Westerners tend to confuse modernization—defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization—with Westernization.

the entry of East Asians into the social sciences is going to transform how we think about human thought and behavior across the board.